Why another complex minigame that will probably die in 2 weeks?

[Kurando]

Why can't we just have a minigame that anyone can pick up in seconds. That is fun. And that people actually want to play on a regular basis for the sake of playing it? I would bet if they added multiplayer pong, more people would be playing it that any of the existing games.

The thing is we do already have plenty of minigames that players can do, it's not like the isn't any there at all. Mahjong is one of those things that you either have an interest in or you don't, it's not a requirement that it needs to be accessible to every single player and that's a good thing. It's a bit like the Ultimate raids, it's not for everyone but it did satisfy a small base of players and brought something completely different to what we usually get in the game.

Mahjong could very well be dead on certain worlds, but come on now the game isn't just made for the Western market, and this has no doubt made a group of players very happy to see it being introduced after all this time. Could we do with more minigames, yes most probably, but only time will tell what the future holds.

[Arya_Leviathan]

The thing is we do already have plenty of minigames that players can do, it's not like the isn't any there at all. Mahjong is one of those things that you either have an interest in or you don't, it's not a requirement that it needs to be accessible to every single player and that's a good thing. It's a bit like the Ultimate raids, it's not for everyone but it did satisfy a small base of players and brought something completely different to what we usually get in the game.

Mahjong could very well be dead on certain worlds, but come on now the game isn't just made for the Western market, and this has no doubt made a group of players very happy to see it being introduced after all this time. Could we do with more minigames, yes most probably, but only time will tell what the future holds.

Mahjong is actually decently popular here in the west also (although an American variant), the Mahjongg League has around 500k members. Though it's probably mostly made up of old generation vets and doesn't see much of the younger generations. Mahjong is also very popular in eastern countries (of some different variants of course). And riichi is actually probably even more popular than the American and European variants due to anime/manga culture.

So to OP I actually think while it may die off eventually on NA/EU just like with most other minigames I'm fairly certain it'll remain fairly popular on JP, and on NA there will probably still be a small group of a devoted playerbase as it's a good alternative to the popular tenhou for english speaking players (you can play Mahjong on free trial). Mahjong was also added as a side hobby for the devs, and who knows since it will be a popular GS minigame for JP it might give the devs a lee way to get ideas to start adding more larger minigames into FFXIV than just GATEs here and there.