Trying to understand the negative posts I keep seeing about the Dev Team

[alimdia]

Am I the only one who thinks it's the person holding the purse strings who says yay or nay on regarding changes, and not the developers? Sometimes I think the finger of blame is pointed in the wrong direction, is it really the developers that have control/final say on what gets put into the game?

Speaking in general, in many games you have one company in charge of the publishing side (this includes hosting the game, the GMs, support, localization, marketing, etc) with a producer at the head, and the developing side (this includes creating the actual content, art, music, assets, bosses, maps, quests, lore, etc) with a director of development at the head.

FFXIV being a self published game means all of that is handled by a single company, but there's something special with FFXIV where the head of development and the head of publishing is the same person, producer and director Naoki Yoshida, so as far as content direction goes he's the person pulling the strings and everything has to go through his approval. If you watch interviews of other FFXIV team members or that one noclip documentary they mention how much of the decision making goes through Yoshida, and if he requests something the team tries to make it happen, even if it means changing the planned story. For example I remember reading it was Yoshida that requested this expansion to also focus on the far east when the original plan was Gyr Abania.

Now on the money topic, FFXIV is still subject to a budget from the parent company (Square Enix) which means Yoshida himself cannot control how much of the money that goes from FFXIV into SE comes back to FFXIV, he can only make requests. And the marketing I mentioned on the publishing side usually also works with management from the company and doesn't answer just to Yoshida, so the producer doesn't exactly have full control on how the money is spent, but he can make requests, those requests likely take into account things like return of investment and other areas of the game that also need to make use of the budget. Just speaking here how it usually works in other companies, I don't know if that's exactly how it works here.

Ultimately with a job title comes some responsibilities and accountability, which is why high staff positions are paid so much. You're accountable for anything people under you do or don't do even if it's not your fault, and this is the case of someone with the producer or the director of a project. Securing funds for infrastructure is the job of the producer. The fiasco that was Pagos is overseen by the director.

On the infrastructure we don't know if the producer has been trying and management is just not approving funds for that, or that the producer doesn't recognize it as a problem and isn't focusing on it. We're left in the blind here. But on development I don't think management has anything to do with how poorly received has been the latest content.