Final Fantasy 14 still keeping Square Enix afloat amid declining financial results

[Tetsujin]

So how many people are supposed to work on jobs? There's a point where too many cooks spoil the pot on something like that.

Cutbacks. lol. You only see what you want to see because maybe you don't like all that's coming out. "New hardware doesn't exist. New game modes don't exist. We're not getting two ultimates. We've got no new game modes this year. " :rolleyes :rolleyes :rolleyes

The budget! The budget! like you know. :rolleyes

How about not 4 people for 20 jobs? How about at the very least one main for each category of job? I don't even know the second part of your post was about, but I happen to live on planet earth. If this game is both keeping a company afloat and being paid for by its playerbase monthly, I'd hope its company would invest in it more to keep the trend going.

Maybe you weren't around when a big portion of the FFXIV team got poached to work on other projects or when SHB didn't have enough funding for a deep dungeon but they sure were investing in FFXV and the travesty that was and is FFVII:R but I remember. Do tell me what we have gained since 4.0 in terms of content that wasn't there before? How did the volume increase? No, better shot scenes and voices don't count. The MSQ is important, yes, but I'm talking about things that will keep you playing here and add variety. What have we gotten? Worse job design by miles? No hard dungeons? Bozja? No two ultimates? No deep dungeon which I mentioned above?

I do think they're trying to make more meaningful content in EW given the plans for their harder 4-man content, the supposedly custom dungeon, the much needed PvP revamp and reward system, the island. But come on, bro.

[DixieBellOCE]

I'd like to see quality go up and the game get the attention it deserves from SE then.

Can agree with this.

Time to expand the 3 man Anti-Bot team to 4.
Might get some bots banned every 9 months instead of 10.

[Arazehl]

Well yeah, thats a given, what im saying is that content that was provide and the quality has been not the best. I was not trying to use dungeon counts and jobs a metric what so ever that was told to us during the ll. But once again is where does the money go? Keep in mind that there are add on they add such as mahjong and that was created by two people( if i remember) and not to bash them but who really asked to add mahjong? Heck take golden saucer, they took out gates

All the money goes to their August 2022 update.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgiGAWRQL-I

[Luamche]

Sorry to all the prophets of doom who (laughably) think the game is somehow in decline, but FFXIV subscriptions continue to grow.

From Eurogamer (bold is mine for emphasis):

“However, while net sales of HD games has declined year on year, sales of MMO games have conversely risen year on year.

In fact, the proportion of sales from MMO games was higher than that of HD games for the first time, despite the MMO category only consisting of three games: Final Fantasy 14, Dragon Quest 10, and Final Fantasy 11.

Square Enix states that "paying subscribers for Final Fantasy 14 rose YoY", while for HD games "sales did not reach the level of the previous year despite the release of multiple new titles".

Congrats, Yoshi-P!

This has been the case since I started playing the game. I asked a coworker to evaluate the stock for me shortly after joining the game in January 2020. While she works in Finance and was an analyst on wall street, she explained that holding companies are more difficult to pin down financially and that it appeared that the FF14 franchise was holding the rest of the company up financially. As she said at the time: 'as far as i can tell' and 'without spending a ton of time trying to understand their financials'. So this is nothing new, to me anyway.

The problem I have with this reality is that they spend the profits from this game making shitty other games that go nowhere instead of enhancing our experience as paying customers. The months spent enduring queues so people that just joined the game 20 minutes ago could access the 'story' and then leave the game there after were particularly off-putting. The question then arises about EndWalker profits and where they went? We all know it was a blowout success, but what did that mean for the players? For me? It meant the inability to access the game in a way that ANY paying customer would expect for 2 or 3 solid months.

I would like to see housing shortages and log-in queues resolved once and for all. 65 million spent on a dumpster fire failed IP rather than the players that generated that revenue pisses me off a little bit, as it should all FF14 players. And that 65million was just one Avengers title. I don't know the background on the rest of the bad games, but this appears to be an ongoing pattern for this company.

Sure Congrats Yoshi-P but the larger question looms: Why are the players paying the bills not being afforded more resources to enhance their gameplay experience? BECAUSE WE DONT MATTER, obviously. I submit that this model is unsustainable. Why do these forums flash-me-back to 1997? They are easily 20 years old.

The game remains fun, but how long can they continue to pump minimal resources into it, use the surplus for failed titles and then rinse and repeat before they kill the golden goose?

[Raoabolic]

The problem I have with this reality is that they spend the profits from this game making shitty other games that go nowhere instead of enhancing our experience as paying customers. The months spent enduring queues so people that just joined the game 20 minutes ago could access the 'story' and then leave the game there after were particularly off-putting. The question then arises about EndWalker profits and where they went? We all know it was a blowout success, but what did that mean for the players? For me? It meant the inability to access the game in a way that ANY paying customer would expect for 2 or 3 solid months.

I'm not sure why people are so shocked about this, SE is a company and this seems about right. Back during ARR and HW the devs were working to keep a job so it makes sense they actually try. The issue is when the boss walks into the room and is all like "Hey, your project seems to be doing well. You should add a cash shop!". Now, anyone who has been paying attention knows that their boss has just given an ultimatum and we WILL be getting a cash shop in the game. HOWEVER, the size of your dev team really hasn't gotten that much bigger and now you have to figure out how to implement a cash shop that will work with the game. This will be an issue and might explain why content was getting drier and drier during each patch. Doesn't matter though, your dev team is given a hearty pat on the back and they now have a job for the foreseeable future. Why would they listen to players that are actively going against their boss's roadmap to making as much money as the company can without investing a ton of resources into it? They wouldn't, a cushy job is hard to let go. So let's learn to let go and enjoy another example of a MMO "too big to fail" since a gold egg laid by a golden goose is good but I bet golden goose meat would sell for a lot more! lol

[Striker44]

I would like to see housing shortages and log-in queues resolved once and for all. 65 million spent on a dumpster fire failed IP rather than the players that generated that revenue pisses me off a little bit, as it should all FF14 players. And that 65million was just one Avengers title. I don't know the background on the rest of the bad games, but this appears to be an ongoing pattern for this company.

Sure Congrats Yoshi-P but the larger question looms: Why are the players paying the bills not being afforded more resources to enhance their gameplay experience? BECAUSE WE DONT MATTER, obviously. I submit that this model is unsustainable. Why do these forums flash-me-back to 1997? They are easily 20 years old.

The game remains fun, but how long can they continue to pump minimal resources into it, use the surplus for failed titles and then rinse and repeat before they kill the golden goose?

I've never been into housing, but that login queue issue is just going to leave you frustrated because it's solution makes horrible business sense. Someone made a cargo ship analogy a while ago that I felt was very apt. Suppose you are moving cargo by ship, and 98% of the time, you move about 3,000 units of cargo at a time. However, 2% of the time you end up with 300,000 units of cargo to move. You'd be effectively wasting a ton of money buying a 300,000-unit ship to actually get filled 2% of the time and only using 1% of its space the other 98%. It makes no financial sense to create this immense server capacity to handle a situation that will only happen briefly every few years (if that - EW was the first time period that it got this rough).

To answer your other question - I don't need anything else to "enhance" my gameplay experience. I already thoroughly enjoy it. And to claim Yoshi-P and the dev team think we're worthless is, frankly, uncalled for. Everything I see says the exact opposite.

How long can they keep doing this? Well, considering their current approach has led to EW, which experienced the largest playerbase in its entire history, where even the end-of-patch "troughs" blow away similar troughs in past expansions (and created those very immense queues you complained about before), it seems like it's doing the opposite of "killing" anything...

[Axxion]

I've never been into housing, but that login queue issue is just going to leave you frustrated because it's solution makes horrible business sense. Someone made a cargo ship analogy a while ago that I felt was very apt. Suppose you are moving cargo by ship, and 98% of the time, you move about 3,000 units of cargo at a time. However, 2% of the time you end up with 300,000 units of cargo to move. You'd be effectively wasting a ton of money buying a 300,000-unit ship to actually get filled 2% of the time and only using 1% of its space the other 98%. It makes no financial sense to create this immense server capacity to handle a situation that will only happen briefly every few years (if that - EW was the first time period that it got this rough).

To answer your other question - I don't need anything else to "enhance" my gameplay experience. I already thoroughly enjoy it. And to claim Yoshi-P and the dev team think we're worthless is, frankly, uncalled for. Everything I see says the exact opposite.

How long can they keep doing this? Well, considering their current approach has led to EW, which experienced the largest playerbase in its entire history, where even the end-of-patch "troughs" blow away similar troughs in past expansions (and created those very immense queues you complained about before), it seems like it's doing the opposite of "killing" anything...

With all the money that received from 14 , its not be pumped back into see my previous post about that, as you see we have a lot of random collaborations with 14, We had a doll, a watch. The doll is about 980 USD, the watch was from a company called citzenwatch, they make expensive watches.

Another thing to note that it seems that you and other forget is that XIV has been using the same 1.0 until now. remember the launch of end walker and they had to come out and said that a error happened because of using 1.0 bug? https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...57f7b5b78b9bb3.

Another thing to note with that even if you got in during this time the and you tried to enter a home or an apartment it would had told you that the instance was full. ( and i do know that getting servers where a big issue to covid, they were not being transparent enough leading up to endwalker to tell us that they where getting new servers but waited until things hit the fan to say something)

Since you know that you don't have the problem( since you keep using I's) other people are. It impacting how they want to enjoy the game and to just dismiss this is appalling to say the least. Keep in mind everybody have there own version on how they enjoy this game from raiding to rping. To owning an house to crafting to building an island

With all the money that they have received they could had fixed alot of race issues that people like to enjoy , minus you because you only think of yourself. They could revamped the code that they used pre covid.

All the money that have received and the growth of this game because 1) the situation with activation blizzard 2) how they aggressively been marketing expansion (hiring movie stars like tom holland & a comedian Hannibal Buress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqju18pcq6U) Or every other ad for Endwalker

And dont get me started with feedback because once again it drowned out by cult that always thinks things are fine and they really not because they dont do that content

TlDR the resources are not being used properly

[Deveryn]

Stop talking about money like it can just solve everything.

[Axxion]

Stop talking about money like it can just solve everything.

[DPZ2]

This has been the case since I started playing the game. I asked a coworker to evaluate the stock for me shortly after joining the game in January 2020. While she works in Finance and was an analyst on wall street, she explained that holding companies are more difficult to pin down financially and that it appeared that the FF14 franchise was holding the rest of the company up financially. As she said at the time: 'as far as i can tell' and 'without spending a ton of time trying to understand their financials'. So this is nothing new, to me anyway.

Yes, FFXIV: A Realm Reborn was a life saver for the company. Ten years ago. Not so much these days.

Square Enix publishes quarterly financial reports, where one may determine that the Digital Entertainment division currently provides over 50% of net sales. FFXIV (and the other MMORPGs that Square Enix handles) only provides around a quarter of those sales.

One would have to believe that MMORPGs have zero costs to determine that the operating income (about 26% of net sales) for the Digital Entertainment division is mostly the result of MMORPG sales.

Go look for yourself:https://www.hd.squareenix.com/eng/ir...planatory.html