Zepla: Endwalker is the Worst FFXIV Expansion I have played

[Lauront]

FFXIV's peak monthly active player counts are somewhere in the region of 20 million.

Plus as mentioned elsewhere, the likes of Everquest didn't have huge lines of Merchandise and cash shop 'DLC'.

FFXIV's turn over dwarfs anything Verant/SoE could have dreamed of with Everquest. The issue isn't the amount of money FFXIV brings, it's that it's not being invested back into the game. Instead it's being used to fund other titles.

His argument is fatuous but I don't believe XIV has ever reached 20 million peak active monthly players. SE use that number (thereabouts) but usually in connection with registered accounts ever made afaik, and that's a cumulative count. The last time they were drawn out in confirming an active player count it was in the 1m region (relevant section quoted below). Even if we were to account for the WoW 'refugee' exodus, I personally don't see it exceeding 2m. The LB census data put it at 1.7m at its peak and even that's got its own issues, as LittleImp pointed out (1) susceptibility to alts and 2) to FLC bloat.)

The amount of active players has surpassed a million and the number of subcribers has also reached a never before seen level.

Regardless, no matter how you look at it, there is no plausible way you could ever consider SE a smol indy.

I think the issue, besides funds, is the amount of staff they commit to the game - wasn't the job design team ultimately down to 4 people? And they have admitted to moving staff to work on XVI.

It sort of is, money is not just there and just because some big company earned a billion during the year, then you need to cut in all the expenses as well, I don't think you realize the business point of view as in having healthy business running as well, it is not like they can just take funds earned from other other projects, those funds need to be there for these other projects and further development of eg. seequals and new games down that line as well.

That's why you look at profit (income), and even looking at that, theirs is in the billions of dollars. SE is one of the larger gaming companies out there by market capitalisation. Sure, it's not EA, but by that logic, EA is not Microsoft either. You bring up Ubisoft as a big company - their market cap exceeds Ubisoft's. And of course they can take funds earned from other projects, they do this routinely, including with XIV itself. The goal of the product is to generate income for investors - some of that money will (hopefully) be invested back into the product or cross-subsidise other products. That is the business point of view. And if they can minimise how much they have to reinvest whilst still generating good income? So much the better from that perspective. They're just not constrained by their income in the way a smol indy is. How they deploy their resources is ultimately a choice.

I think people expect to get more than what they want to pay for, and long story short... it is cheaper much cheaper to play FFXIV than buying every AAA game that is released based alone on the time spendt playing each game, also uhm... AAA games today has been downgraded to HHH games due to Larion Set the Bar of games with Baldurs Gate 3 and big companies like EA and UBISOFT and more has been out complaining about that they made the game is too good.... ( it is an epic good game ) and they did not even add lootboxes and other kinds of stuff and forced on weird server things.

Is it? You have to pay for the expansion upfront and the sub cost adds up over a year, and could be argued to only be as low as it is because they're banking on mogstation sales, which IMO skews their priorities. Even if the sub cost is relatively 'low', it's a discretionary expenditure I don't have to make, so the game needs to be able to justify to its consumer spending any amount of money or time on it. But sure, I'll agree that Larian is upstaging some of these 'AAA' publishers/developers.