Quote Originally Posted by Kaedan View Post
When are people going to understand, as Yoshida himself has even said, that money isn't everything? You can throw as much money as you want at something, it won't make it go faster, won't make it perfect, and won't make it necessarily successful. There are thousands of examples of companies throwing money at a project and it still going belly up.

It's a question of reasonable use of manpower. Every new race, as Yoshida said, is thousands of hours of work hours needed that could be spent more effectively elsewhere (since ultimately, races are nothing more than cosmetics, not game content).
Ehh... It's not quite as simple as that.

From a consumer perspective, throwing money at the game will make things go faster and will solve our problems.

Since, more money spent on more people means shared workload. I.e. Instead of having 1 guy go through the game altering 10,000 items to fit a new race, you get 10 people going through the game altering 1,000 items each to fit a new race. Effectively increasing efficiency tenfold.

Not only that, but more people means more teams can be simultaneously working on different parts of the game. You can have teams working on MSQ, Dungeons, Raids, Eureka, PvP, Glamour, Housing, Character Customization, Side Quests, Deep Dungeons, Job Balance, New Jobs, Job Quests, New Activities etc. All at the same time and thus creating content for each aspect regularly.

Thus, from a player perspective, money DOES solve everything (In the case where it's going towards new staff, not just going to the CEO's wallet like many companies seem to do >.>)

The questions come from the other side of the fence. From the side of the company. Since they want to make profit and they thus will not just throw infinite amounts of money at the game unless they are sure that they will get it all back AND MORE.

They're the ones that need to balance expenditure of money and reasonable use of manpower, so that they don't lose money and therefore shut down the game.

For FFXIV, it's in somewhat of a precarious situation because of the way that SE has set things up. Where the money is provided by the parent company and it's Yoshida and his team that balance out the expenditure and manpower. With the baseline situation where the majority of the money made by the game is already siphoned off by the parent company and re-distributed elsewhere.

Meaning that Yoshi and Co. Are working essentially from a limited fund that is not directly related to how well the game is doing (So they can't for example, do something well and get a bunch more subs and then use the extra money to expand the team and the content they provide to retain those subs. Instead, they do something well and get a bunch more subs and they have exactly the same amount of money to try and retain them unless Papa SE decides to give them more), which causes them to be limited in what they can and cannot do, since their every move needs to be justifiable to SE.

This is why certain things are difficult for them to overcome. Why they can't simply have a team to rewrite the Character Creation code to make adding new options such as hairstyles, faces, body types (Fat, thin, tall, short, butt sliders etc) much easier. Why they can't rewrite the Inventory System to make it not trash and allow for easier times implementing additional space and creating a Glamour system that doesn't suck. Why they can't simply alter how Housing is done to allow for things like Glamour Dressers in houses or things like Balconies. Yoshi and Co. KNOW that people want these things. They KNOW that they're popular requests. But they cannot JUSTIFY working on them to SE and thus cannot do anything about them.

It's the reason behind the single gender races. They KNOW that people want Male Viera and Female Hrothgar. But they cannot JUSTIFY working on them to SE. Not unless Female Viera and Male Hrothgar prove to be profitable enough for SE for it to be considered a reasonable use of manpower.

So, it ends up being the thing that people understand is that while Square Enix is a multi-million dollar company. The team working on FFXIV is not Squeenix as a whole, but a subsidiary that is funded BY Squeenix and is thus at the mercy of their financial decisions.