FF14 Companion app Premium Service

[Kirsten_Rev]

In fairness, they'll be the first to know when that happens, since all these financial decisions are made by looking at metrics. (They keep adding these options because people keep buying it.) They also do pretty extensive exit surveys and have tons of feedback from many sources so that, when the trends start pointing in a certain direction, it should not be hard to figure out why. But I suspect the solution they arrive at will not be to just suddenly roll back the MogStation or the premium app. Rather, I suspect they'll reconsider the underlying subscription model for the game. The thing that riles people up the most about all this monetization is that they're paying a subscription, so the easy fix is just to make it so that you don't have to pay a subscription to play the game. That will also help push their player numbers up, exposing more people to up-sells and side-monetization. I suspect their own version of "WoW Tokens" might be the next step down this road.

Quite possible, but I wouldn't be quite so confident in their ability to spot trouble before it happens - particularly if the P2W aspect is, like for me, more of a contributing factor than the primary reason for leaving. After all, the downside of obtaining most of your information from exit surveys is that the player has already exited - if and when a wave happens, it will quite likely be too late to initiate a rapid policy change to retain those players.

I'd also argue that the complete and utter lack of active-player surveys demonstrates they can't be paying too much attention. Case in point, unofficial censuses, along with SE's most recently quarterly financials, suggest strongly that Stormblood is not aging nearly as well as ARR or Heavensward did. The likely culprit is the format of FFXIV's content cycle and relative lack of truly fresh content, a topic which routinely generates long feedback threads here on the OF. Yet, I don't see any indication that SE is changing course. No surveys. No feedback sought. Eureka Pagos even appears to be a doubling-down of sorts, with Yoshi-P essentially saying in his recent Gamescom interview that players should suck it up. It appears to me that SE is ignoring a growing problem here, one that risks blowing up spectacularly in the near future if 5.0 appears certain to continue down the current path.

Finally, even assuming SE can see this coming, it's quite likely a lot of the people who support the Mog Station, app, etc. - people who do not view these as P2W features - nonetheless don't want to see FFXIV go F2P. SE could jump out of the frying pan and into the fire if it's not careful, and people who support the current monetization model might find their own personal red lines are tomorrow's slippery slope. Worth keeping in mind, anyway.

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All that said, I don't want to diminish your point. It is a fair one to make, and it's well taken. But personally, I have extremely little faith in SE's ability to gather and interpret customer opinions, specifically in regards to FFXIV. Their community outreach efforts have done nothing but diminish since ARR released, and the running joke about SE not caring until the Japanese player base complains is only partly humourous.

[polyphonica]

Case in point, unofficial censuses, along with SE's most recently quarterly financials, suggest strongly that Stormblood is not aging nearly as well as ARR or Heavensward did.

At least on the quarterly financials front, they actually called out on-going FFXIV revenue as a strong point, and on Lucky Bancho's unofficial census the amount of people who cleared recent patches is actually higher than it was at an equivalent time in Heavensward, so it's not exactly a very clear picture or trend at this point. Of course, there's no doubt that there's an increasing amount of disgruntled people, as is bound to happen as a game enters its 5th year, plus we have just had a few major releases that'll compete for players (particularly NA/EU players). The monetization strategy will also be an issue for some people, but I suspect it's particularly aggravating people while they're feeling the content (and volume of content) isn't to their liking.

If the game were to go F2P, although it would upset some people who like the game precisely because it's subscription-based, it will also open up the game to many large markets, so the net impact on the player count will be a gain. That said, I'm not saying that I personally want it to go that way, as I've definitely seen (as many of us have) the ways F2P can warp a game. But, at the end of the day, Square Enix isn't going to accept a loss in revenue based on a belief that it'll make people happier; the decisions will be based on the numbers, for better or worse.