Quote Originally Posted by Antipika View Post
I hope you are joking right? Branding deals comes up with goals to achieve on their contract. SE gets money if... the game is a success.
You quite obviously lack facts.
The branding operations in Japan were made by PC manufacturers for the game's launch. The numbers of sales at launch were a clear success in Japan, and moved quite a lot of high-end gaming PCs. Continuated popularity of the game has no bearing tho this, since once the PC is sold, it's sold. The manufacturer got his money.

Ergo, the branding operations made in Japan have been a success. And made Se money (and not a little, since there was a level of third party branding basically unprecedented in the market for a game's launch) that's to be counted into FFXIV's balance.

This, of course, without mentioning that success related clauses are very rare in branding operations, and are used only with weak brands. if you think something associated with a Final Fantasy brand in japan had any clause like that, I see a big delusion there.

Anyway, even if branding was successful, global income results would still be far away from SE's expectations. There is no discussion about that, it is a {fact}. When your goal is to make money of subscriptions + branding. You remove subscriptions. What remains? Less income. Not enough to reach goals that were set initially.
A commercial operation is not a "failure" if it brings a profit. And since you have no numbers to corroborate your *opinion* that FFXIV, as an operation, is in the red, you have no arguments other than your own baseless speculaution
As long as FFXIV has already made SE enough money to cover operation until subscription fees are restarted (which is entirely possible), the game isn't a failure. That's all there's to it.