If you could ask 1 question to the Devs

[Jandroid]

Real honest question:

Are profits earned from Final Fantasy XIV used to fund other Square Enix projects such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, New Luminous Studio IP, Unannounced 3rd Business Unit Project, etc. instead of Final Fantasy XIV itself?

Shadowbringers was a big success and, correct me if I'm wrong, we're at peak subscriber count. Despite this, I honestly feel as if this game doesn't get enough funding and could hire additional developers to create more content and at faster pace. It doesn't feel like the success of Shadowbringers translated to more development resources being allocated to the game. It would be nice to have some transparency on where our money is being allocated to.

[DrWho2010]

Real honest question:

Are profits earned from Final Fantasy XIV used to fund other Square Enix projects such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, New Luminous Studio IP, Unannounced 3rd Business Unit Project, etc. instead of Final Fantasy XIV itself?

Shadowbringers was a big success and, correct me if I'm wrong, we're at peak subscriber count. Despite this, I honestly feel as if this game doesn't get enough funding and could hire additional developers to create more content and at faster pace. It doesn't feel like the success of Shadowbringers translated to more development resources being allocated to the game. It would be nice to have some transparency on where our money is being allocated to.

good luck with a major game company opening their books for lil ol you. you can throw money at the game but it still would require people of sufficient caliber to be hired. they've stated that finding people that can do such tasks are very hard to find.

[Enla]

Real honest question:

Are profits earned from Final Fantasy XIV used to fund other Square Enix projects such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, New Luminous Studio IP, Unannounced 3rd Business Unit Project, etc. instead of Final Fantasy XIV itself?

Shadowbringers was a big success and, correct me if I'm wrong, we're at peak subscriber count. Despite this, I honestly feel as if this game doesn't get enough funding and could hire additional developers to create more content and at faster pace. It doesn't feel like the success of Shadowbringers translated to more development resources being allocated to the game. It would be nice to have some transparency on where our money is being allocated to.

We've confirmed via live letter in the past that the Mogstation profits are the only profits that 100% go back into the game. So, yes, you can make the logical assumption that a good chunk of the rest of the funds is being used for other SE projects or even to help with basic things like employee payroll.

[AsunaKiss]

why don’t you make a map with open pvp or a pvp game mode where players have the same status as their char pve, and could also have free company war over territory could be war over home territory for example, or something similar to a siege as in other MMO's.
I feel like all the effort we make on pve is useless, since pvp modes have their own settings and balance.

[Genz]

Are you planning to hire a competent and inspired game designer ?

[Jandroid]

good luck with a major game company opening their books for lil ol you. you can throw money at the game but it still would require people of sufficient caliber to be hired. they've stated that finding people that can do such tasks are very hard to find.

No need to act so condescending with your reply.

I do understand that it's difficult to find amazing talents but it does get a bit disappointing when we had amazing talents like Hiroshi Takai, Kazutoyo Maehiro, Mitsutoshi Gondai, and Kazuya Takahashi step down to less significant roles but not hire enough to fill in the gap.

Thankfully, Natsuko Ishikawa and Yusuke Mogi have stepped up from their previous roles to maintain and even improve the quality of the game. Nonetheless, I do believe that additional hires can help ease their workload even if just a little bit and allow them to focus on improving the quality of their work.

I'm probably just being wishful at this point but I'd really like it if a bit more of Square Enix's resources can be put into this game.

We've confirmed via live letter in the past that the Mogstation profits are the only profits that 100% go back into the game. So, yes, you can make the logical assumption that a good chunk of the rest of the funds is being used for other SE projects or even to help with basic things like employee payroll.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't know that this has been addressed before. It's just a bit frustrating that the success of Shadowbringers didn't translate to a huge overall improvement in updates.

But in hindsight, I do think I'm sounding unreasonably impatient (possibly due to quarantine boredom). I'm gonna sound hopeful and optimistic here, but I'm still holding out hope that the success of Shadowbringers mean that more resources are being put on the next expansion especially since they plan content way ahead of time. Thinking about it now, the Shadowbringers patches were very likely already planned before the expansion even came out.

[DrWho2010]

its not condescending it's thinking within the realm of reality. so many people have so many selfish requests it's unbelievable.

[Jandroid]

its not condescending it's thinking within the realm of reality. so many people have so many selfish requests it's unbelievable.

It was the first sentence of your post that was condescending. You didn't need to add that in to get your point across. I'd have to admit that the rest of your post were fine and informative though.

Also, it isn't necessarily a good thing to limit yourself in thinking within the realm of reality. Science and technology wouldn't have progressed to what it is today if mankind never explored the realm of possibilities. In fact, conventional knowledge would have leaned more towards the cancellation of Final Fantasy XIV when it first launched in 2010. A 2013 reboot would have sounded ludicrous if everyone was to be pragmatic. I'm more of an idealist than I am a pragmatist however so we probably aren't going to see eye to eye over many things and that's just the nature of it.

However, I agree that many people here do bring up unreasonable requests that is beyond the scope of the project so I can see why you can get cynical. The underlying argument behind my question though was that Square Enix should give more funding to this game (which can also increase the scope of the project). Although I'd have to admit that it seemed very rash and impatient of me to say so since content is developed far ahead of time and that a potential increase in funding might be better reflected in the next expansion rather than the current updates to Shadowbringers.

[Payotz]

...they've stated that finding people that can do such tasks are very hard to find.

That still doesn't excuse the fact that they could train people to do tasks.
If there was no training, then we would still be relying on Nobuo for music, and we would not have Soken writing such great music.

[SpiralMask]

That still doesn't excuse the fact that they could train people to do tasks.
If there was no training, then we would still be relying on Nobuo for music, and we would not have Soken writing such great music.

bringing in a fresh person could take months/years to train (training in whatever engine specific stuff is going on, integration into their teams, learning their way around the codebase since basically every person has their own 'dialect' when coding) and each new person added actually decreases the efficiency of this process further (there have been a great many GDC talks over the years explaining the woes and statistics of exactly this), which is a huge investment that people would complain about not getting content ASAP after the announced new hires, since even experienced devs cant just drop in and get straight to work.

this isnt necessarily aimed at you, just that folks saying "just throw more money/people at it" are pretty greatly underestimating the challenges and time involved--and just injecting more money wont work either, since there's only so many man-hours the staff can give, and the company is adamant about not becoming a crunch-heavy or "black" company.