Is Square Enix ever going to release SA servers?

[ReynTime]

To be honest it's extremely likely there are more SA players than Oceania...

Oceania is getting a DC because their ping issue is actually worse in general from what my australian friends tell me. Also, JP players don't like dealing with people who don't speak japanese.

And lastly, this game doesn't have a spanish or portuguese localization. Which would be questioned more if they built a south american datacenter.

[Puremallace]

I know many people might say that FFXIV is not as popular here, but at the same time I do believe they have more players in SA than in Oceania. The ping is always high and sometimes is hard to find follow south americans in servers, even though I think there is a realm where there are a lot of brazilians.

Also we can see that investment here can be a good idea, New World SA servers were the most crouded ones in the alpha (in part because there were less servers, but anyway).

They did talk about this on the last fanfest I thought? Oceanic took priority because it was already in process. Yoshi P also has like 3 seperate interviews in the last month where he said this topic comes up daily at their offices but COVID is screwing up everything in the world at the moment.

[Sotaris]

To be honest it's extremely likely there are more SA players than Oceania...

Oceania is getting a DC because their ping issue is actually worse in general from what my australian friends tell me. Also, JP players don't like dealing with people who don't speak japanese.

And lastly, this game doesn't have a spanish or portuguese localization. Which would be questioned more if they built a south american datacenter.

Probably more subbed Oceanic playerbase than SA hence it makes sense business and echonomic pov.

[Elissar]

Not in near future i guees. im BR and everytime i show this game to friends or tell how good this game is, they say "wait, do i have to pay to have game AND pay sub? no thanks".

Also most of them don't like the aesthetic of FFXIV or english only.
SE will need to work harder if they want to convince more people from Brazil...i honestly doubt they will. Most profit already come from NA and EU.

[Chekopacheko]

While it would be nice to have a SA center I don't think it will happen anytime soon, I'm from Mexico so the NA center works just fine for me (although not all the time), but the main issue I see is that most people from my region wont play the game unless it is in Spanish and I don't see SE translating the game to Spanish anytime soon, if not ever.

[lezard21]

Not in near future i guees. im BR and everytime i show this game to friends or tell how good this game is, they say "wait, do i have to pay to have game AND pay sub? no thanks"

This is the biggest reason Square might have against opening a SA server. Having "a lot of players from the same region" playing doesn't mean much if they are either free trial accounts, or paying subs on and off or are not purchasing anything from the Mogstation.

Sure, you do have some SA countries and people more wealthy than others, but in average SA people are against paying monthly subs due to the dent it causes in their incomes.

Take for example Argentina where I am from. If you were to buy the non-Steam FFXIV complete version outside of sale, that's equal to AR$ 10020. The minimum wage in Argentina as of August 2021 is stated to be AR$28000. Assuming you don't have to pay rent (which is a minimum of AR$ 20000) and only purchase essential needs and food, just buying the game alone would cost you 35% of your monthly wage. And from then onwards you'd have to pay AR$1670 every month, which represents 6% of your wages. Within these margins, it's very unlikely that people from Argentina will then go on to purchasing items from the Mogstation, which represents a considerable portion of FFXIV's revenue.

Bottomline, if the SA community transactions don't make up for the maintenance cost of a SA server, they won't ever consider opening one.