Mogstation taking another step to the darkside

[Boa-Noah]

I can only ask again, with all the supposed cash shop money, the cut back content, my removed dungeon... what do i exactly get for it?

The straight answer and the one least likely to be well recieved is that you get what you get now.

The current situation FFXIV is in both developmentally and fundamentally is what you get, however SE handles the money coming in from the game is up to them and sadly it doesn't seem like they want to pump funding into FFXIV to really improve it from the current standard. I know the devs always talk about hiring new people and increasing their staff and blah blah blah, so presumably at least some fair portion of the funds are coming back into the game we pay for but the real question is how much? Presumably the cash shop funds go to the developers without being touched, monthly funding I have no goddamn clue because they're raking in the money (depending on how many players have the Legacy sub cost of $9.99 anyways) so I can't imagine SE is literally taking all of it.

Which leaves the biggest question of where the money DOES go and why?

Though I think an equally important question would be: 'How much worse could it be?'

Without the cash shop they're losing a pretty nice portion of funding and that loss of cashflow will directly relate to the game and what they deliver on, especially if they have a mogstation team like other games do that specifically works on shit to be sold. GW2 has one, WoW has one, SWTOR has one, TERA has one, so it's a fair bet that they do too which means there wouldn't be any of the cash shop goodies at all without the dedicated team working on them so right there you'd just have less stuff in the game overall. Now presumably the shop doesn't just fund the team cranking out mounts and skins so the primary team working on the game itself would lose out on some staff and with less staff working on it I can only imagine the quality and breadth of content would reduce. Further there are players that only play to look pretty and have big shiny mounts so you risk losing those players too and that's not great, no whaling and no whaling accounts would be a solid detriment depending on what those crazy players are dishing out since FFXIV has one of the least impactful cash shops.

So yeah, you get what you pay for and you get to enjoy the fruits of other peoples' labor when they spend extra cash on the game.

Win win.

[Melichoir]

Which leaves the biggest question of where the money DOES go and why?

Theres a misunderstanding on how much the game brings in vs overhead costs and development.

Lets say there are currently around 1.5 million active subs at any given time on average. The average sub is $14 a month (Between people who do the minimum sub and people who get the max sub on top of retainers and junk). This means that FFXIV alone pulls down 21 Million Per month in subs. Assuming those subscribers spent $120 average for all expac and subsquent purchases to actually play the game, then break that over 24 (about a 2 year cycle between xpacs), that would be an additional 7.5 Million per month.

So lets say for numbers that SE pulls down 28.5 Million per month in sub fees.

Now lets start thinking about costs. An expansion for FFXIV probably is gonna cost roughly the same as most other MMOs, so ballpark figure is 50 Million to Develop. Doubling that cost seems reasonable just for basic maintenence and upkeep of the ingame assets, patches, balancing, etc. So theres 100 Million right there, per expac . Per month that translates into.... 4 Million in upkeep. Then we have to start considering SE as a company whole. SE employs roughly 4600 people. If we assume the average salary for an SE employee is an easy 40k (according to google atleast), that means employee costs per year is...184 Million or about 15 Million a month in employee costs. That puts us up to 19 Million in costs per month on just development/upkeep of FFXIV, and Employee Salaries. Thats already over half of what SE pulls in from Sub fees. Then we have to start considering Other costs. Computers and Servers cost money. Desks and resources employees use cost money. Utilities cost money. Buildings they use and rent/own cost money. Proprietary software they lease or develop costs money. Legal fees cost money. Modifications and changes to the game to be able to participate in certain markets costs money. It would not be a stretch in the least bit that all the overhead of running an actual Global business like SE per month probably ranges in the few million range. Lets say a grand total of 2.5 Million in all that nonsense. So where we at...Ah yeah, 21.5 Million per month. Then there's advertisement campaigns. Tack on another 2 Million as a safe bet and were already at 23.5 Million.

So out of 28.5 Million subs, its not unreasonable to think theyre spending 23.5 Million per month in costs. That leaves them with about a 5 million dollar wiggle room. Then we gotta tack on some more costs, cause why not. First one is that FFXIV 1.0 was a complete and utter flop. That was a huge investment that tanked. They lost money on that, not only in that the dev costs, but also investment costs. See, its not just about whether something costs 10 million or not. It's also a factor of how much that 10 million would make if it was invested into the market or other sources. So the bigger the dollar tag, the greater that hurts in reality cause thats also lost investment opportunity and time. So that is probably why weve seen or still are seeing SE operating FFXIV on a shoe string budget. Then SE also uses money cross game depts to fund other projects. So some of that 5 Million spare cash probably goes into other projects, not just FFXIV. And whatever is left probably goes into a warchest of sorts for a rainy day.


The TLDR is that While SE does pull in a lot of cash, they have a lot of expenses too. It's not like every dollar they bring in on a sub means its free to do with whatever they like. Theyre a business thta has costs. And before the "well se recorded this much in profits" point people like to say - Keep in mind that MOST businesses will inflate their income numbers to some extent by using loopholes and the like to get more investors and market interest.

As a last point - Due to a lot of the disappointment and some of that pushback with Hrothgar and Viera only being one sex each, as well as both species being hyper limited in customization, I honestly wouldnt be surprised if part of the reason why it went down to 1 dungeon per patch and why some of the content seems more limited and recycled this xpac in many ways might very well be to correct the customization issues at the least (if not the potential, albeit slim, of having Fem Hrothgars and Male Viera). Im not saying that is whats going on, but it would explain some of it. Unless SE is going through some weird economic turmoil, it wouldnt be in there interest to cut funding to the dev team even further as FFXIV is a good source of continuous monthly revenue for the company.

[BunniEclair]

As a last point - Due to a lot of the disappointment and some of that pushback with Hrothgar and Viera only being one sex each, as well as both species being hyper limited in customization, I honestly wouldnt be surprised if part of the reason why it went down to 1 dungeon per patch and why some of the content seems more limited and recycled this xpac in many ways might very well be to correct the customization issues at the least (if not the potential, albeit slim, of having Fem Hrothgars and Male Viera). Im not saying that is whats going on, but it would explain some of it. Unless SE is going through some weird economic turmoil, it wouldnt be in there interest to cut funding to the dev team even further as FFXIV is a good source of continuous monthly revenue for the company.

^^^^

I’ll add that it could certainly partially be this, and from a purely selfish perspective I really hope they are prioritizing it. However, they’ve also been making a ton of QoL changes and completely overhauling crafters and gatherers which I’m sure took a considerable amount of effort. Also, they’ve talked about adding new content that we haven’t seen yet. It’s not dungeons, but hopefully the content they cut will be replaced with fresh content that will be enjoyable in a different way. Yoship seems pretty confident we will enjoy whatever they are working on that supposedly was why they didn’t have funding/resources for the deep dungeon. So I agree, it’s not that these dollars are going straight into the pockets of execs and shareholders and we get nothing. It’s just going elsewhere in the game.

Sorry to go off topic a bit, but your post was really well thought out, and I appreciate you bringing that information to the table!

[Boa-Noah]

-snip-

From what I can find SE typically reports an operating income under $15 billion yen a year on all 3 of their MMO titles, that's about $139,140,000 USD and then broken down by 3 you get $46,380,000 USD yearly, by month that's $3,865,000 USD so you're not that far off really, of course the actual amount no doubt differs between the different games. That said the net earnings is above that $15 billion yen marker, so they're probably bringing in more per month, regardless that's not counting the money SE makes on other stuff like mobile games, books, goodies, collectibles, amusement park/arcade stuff, and all the miscellaneous stuff they put out on the market. The employee costs are usually a business side of things so SE can rearrange and redistribute developers as needed on their various products, makes it easier for them to manage crunch and help out struggling teams with extra staff without having to sign up a bunch of new contracts.

[Melichoir]

From what I can find SE typically reports an operating income under $15 billion yen a year on all 3 of their MMO titles, that's about $139,140,000 USD and then broken down by 3 you get $46,380,000 USD yearly, by month that's $3,865,000 USD so you're not that far off really, of course the actual amount no doubt differs between the different games. That said the net earnings is above that $15 billion yen marker, so they're probably bringing in more per month, regardless that's not counting the money SE makes on other stuff like mobile games, books, goodies, collectibles, amusement park/arcade stuff, and all the miscellaneous stuff they put out on the market. The employee costs are usually a business side of things so SE can rearrange and redistribute developers as needed on their various products, makes it easier for them to manage crunch and help out struggling teams with extra staff without having to sign up a bunch of new contracts.

Right, but my point was that SE is a complete business wiht many facets. FFXIV's profits arent dedicated to only FFXIV. They go to whatever SE needs cash on. Consider that you said that they generate money from MObile Games, Books, goodies, Collectibles, Amusement stuff etc, well all those things also generate costs to manage too. And even money that is net profit isnt necessarily free to be used. If they have, for example, 2 million spare dollars at the end of hte month they generated from FFXIV, they may not dump that back into FFXIV development, but 'loan' that money out to a new IP or project theyre currently working on. When that IP/project finishes, it pays back the loan (typically), but in the mean time that money is in use and isnt readily tapable by FFXIV devs. And this also assumes that business pursuit actually generates a profit.

While much of my work is guess-timation at best, the point I hoped to establish was that yes SE pulls down a ton of cash, but that doesnt mean they have a ton of spending money at the end of the day. I dont believe people really understand that concept from a business perspective.

snips

Pretty much this in a nutshell. It's why I said earlier if we want to get on board the hate train for Gambling Proxies (loot boxes) or games where the DLC released Day 1 is actually the rest of the game they purposefully chopped off, then Im on board with that. Being able to pick and choose cosmetics at my discretion while still being given the lion's share for simply being subbed is 100% fine in my book.