Please grow the MMO part of the game. End game is lousy.

[ForteNightshade]

The world doesn't work this way. You can't just decide you want to tap into a demographic, stick a bendy-straw into it and start magically sucking out all the money.

You have to create a product that appeals to that demographic, and partially retrofitting a subscription MMO into an extremely suboptimal feature-incomplete singleplayer experience absolutely isn't going to do that. Do you really think someone who's primary interests are games like God of War, Horizon, or The Last of Us is going to come pay upwards of $90 usd ($60 usd for the complete edition, and a few months of subscription to complete the msq) to play through this games story? You'd be paying an insane amount of money for what is essentially half of a game. At most, you're going to appeal to an incredibly small demographic (which Yoshida himself defined) of Final Fantasy holdouts who don't want to play the game because it's an online game. Amusingly, many of these supposed holdouts already play the game, further shrinking the supposed target demographic.

A further addendum to this is the lack of long term retention. These story centric hold outs are likely going to quit once they've completed the MSQ, which calls into question if the investment will actually pay dividends when the pool is already extremely shallow to begin with. They're clearly banking on these players becoming hooked enough to stay subscripted far beyond the MSQ and possibly dive into other content. Which could happen but does seem like an odd choice to focus on over the existing playerbase. Granted, FFXIV has always put a lot more investment in attracting new players than retaining old ones.

The devs have the retention numbers, and I believe they understand what the majority of players actually do and what tends to retain customers the best. The devs have also made it clear that making, tweaking and balancing fights are incredibly time consuming when compared to other things they could make. The fact they don’t spend more on such things tells me that endgame stuff likely just isn’t as popular as many make it out to be, or the development time doesn’t give as big a return on investment when compared to some other things. Indeed, they opted to cut deep dungeon and an ultimate entirely from 5.0’s cycle in favor of something like the Ishgard restoration.

Just my humble opinion.

Both of those assessments are untrue. They opted to cut out Deep Dungeon before Shadowbringers even launched, and have repeatedly said they were surprised how much demand there was for it to return. Which kinda throws out the whole retention argument since the numbers would have shown player interest yet they never realized it. As for Ultimate, Yoshida openly admitted it was due to poor management more than anything else. Not only was putting it in the .5 patch cycle incredibly shortsighted as it put a major encounter design up against the expansion development but they were only using eight people to play test it. If anything happened to them, be it the odd sick day; other projects, and etc., they literally couldn't test the fight.

Neither content being cut had anything to do with them focusing more on side activities like Ocean Fishing or treasure maps. The people designing that content aren't playtesting Ultimate, or likely any battle content. And Yoshida has acknowledged their mistakes last expansion.