What happened to the 8 years of data and market analysis?

[Grit]

There was no saving Tanaka. Even if he was the naive child with a toy while the adults destroyed everything, it was still on his watch.

He had what's coming to him, it was obvious. If you screw up, it's your fault, if the people under you screw up, it's your fault. If you and the people under you screw up, it's your fault.

We can only think that someone drugged him up, and put him in the office chair every day, with how FF14 turned out.

Who's to say FFXIV wouldn't have been great if given another entire year to develop it?

Unless Tanaka himself was the one who decided the release date (doubt it), then it's hard to make too many assumptions about his ability to create a good game. The community would have tolerated more development time. The beta testers clamored for it.

I'd say he's definitely guilty of not meeting a deadline, and his fate with the project was expected. But I still <3 Tanaka.

[Chezen]

Can we just turn this thread into a bunch of Tiny Toons references? :P

I've actually spent the last hour or so watching these old cartoons. They're that much funnier with the proper context.

"I knew I should have joined the priesthood."

"...Who wrote this?"

I prefered Animaniacs myself.

In sticking to the Topic line, everyone makes mistakes, even professionals. But we've also seen what they can do. It's the fact that they have such a reputation that people are being even harder on them, I suppose.

[kukurumei]

I'm not a fan of Tanaka from my FFXI days, but we really don't know all that went down so I don't think it is fair to characterize him that way.

We will never fully know what really went on in FF14, because it will be bury less it be an embarrassment to the company. It doesn't matter. It was under his watch.

This isn't an over night disaster. It had a particularly long development time, with a particularly long public response to it during alpha, beta, or whatever they wanted to call that. It was his fault because he was responsible for the project, he had to take the fall.

There was never an exception.

Who's to say FFXIV wouldn't have been great if given another entire year to develop it?

Unless Tanaka himself was the one who decided the release date (doubt it), then it's hard to make too many assumptions about his ability to create a good game. The community would have tolerated more development time. The beta testers clamored for it.

I'd say he's definitely guilty of not meeting a deadline, and his fate with the project was expected. But I still <3 Tanaka.

We are 6+ months in with 2 polls. 99% an extra year of development under the same concepts would have not improved it to the point of any success.

If it could have been turned around with a few bug fixes, we would have had it turned around by january.

you don't have people voting for "radical change", "Battle system is crap, overhaul it" "Nothing makes sense", in beta. You solved those at concept.

[Grit]

Isn't that exactly my point? The game was released in a completely unfinished state. Meaning the beta testing started early and didn't last long enough.. These forums should have also been available during the beta. Everything was rushed. And Tanaka may have had no say in it. How would we know?

[Chezen]

Isn't that exactly my point? The game was released in a completely unfinished state. Meaning the beta testing started early and didn't last long enough.. These forums should have also been available during the beta. Everything was rushed. And Tanaka may have had no say in it. How would we know?

To tell you the truth... rushing it out sounds like a corporate thing, because it really didn't make sense. The people who design the game don't neccesarily get to call the shots.

If Tanaka had to take the fall when it really wasn't his fault, I feel bad for him.

This is of course, pure speculation. I haven't read or seen anything that gives any indication to what happened other than appologies.

[Abriael]

Tanaka was the title's producer. Producers don't take release date decisions, producers don't take decisions about third party branding deals that are probably the main cause of the fact that the game was released prematurely.
Those decisions are taken at the executive level. That's all there's to it.

You can have your boogeyman if you really need to point fingers at someone, unfortunately you're very probably pointing fingers at the wrong someone. "it was under his watch" means nothing. When you're a captain, you do what the general tells you to do, end of story.

[AlexiaKidd]

Isn't that exactly my point? The game was released in a completely unfinished state. Meaning the beta testing started early and didn't last long enough.. These forums should have also been available during the beta. Everything was rushed. And Tanaka may have had no say in it. How would we know?

They actually had forums for the Alpha and Beta testing and believe me they were filled with feedback and it fell on deaf ears. Everyone could see the game was in no state for release, myself and others thought they must have some kind of huge patch ready for release to fix everything as we couldn't believe they would release in such a state but it just wasn't the case.

[kukurumei]

Tanaka was the title's producer. Producers don't take release date decisions, producers don't take decisions about third party branding deals that are probably the main cause of the fact that the game was released prematurely.
Those decisions are taken at the executive level. That's all there's to it.

You can have your boogeyman if you really need to point fingers at someone, unfortunately you're very probably pointing fingers at the wrong someone. "it was under his watch" means nothing. When you're a captain, you do what the general tells you to do, end of story.

So you're saying Tanaka was a figure head for his whole life...which makes him even worse then a failure.

He was the top guy, if he didn't call the shot, and things didn't run through his desk, and he was a "pencil pusher" then he definitely deserved to get fired for that instead.

That's what it means by "It happened on his watch". You're not suppose to sleep, even if you inherited(which he didn't)

And if anyone actually watch the collector's ed DVD "making of" He definitely should have been fired. He pretty much gives a nod of the head to all the controversies that were in the polls.

The truism of "On his watch" is profound since he was the the video game producer. The supposed "super star" position of the gaming world. And they get fame and fortune well because of it.

In fact it maybe more damnation to Tanaka's name because one of the game producer duties is usually the liaison of the development team and the higher management/shareholders. Unless it was unusually different for FF14, then that means Tanaka was the Author Anderson of Enron.

The stake is pretty big because Tanaka's position is that important.

We can call a lot of stupidity that happened in FF14, but if the head-hancho let it happen, it's how it rolls.

[Abriael]

They actually had forums for the Alpha and Beta testing and believe me they were filled with feedback and it fell on deaf ears.

Feedback in beta forums is one of the hardest things to take advantage of for a game developer, mind you, the same goes with feedback in any forum, this one included. You should pretty much be able to notice that feedback doesn't go in only one direction. For each thread that asks for the game to be Final Warcraft XIV there's one that asks for it to be Final Fantasy XI-2, for each person that offers an idea, there's another that offers the opposite. Might seem impossible to the ones that never seen the beta forums, but they were even quite more chaotic than this, with many people utterly refusing to use the feedback threads and just opening hundreds of posts independently because they thought that THEIR idea was the best, and deserved it's own thread. Sounds familiar?

Betas are normally very useful to squash bugs and similar code-level issues, but for real feedback, you don't see many developers following much else than their vision. If they take some idea from them, it's because it already fits their vision, but I wouldn't ever defoine beta forums a valid decisional tool. There's simply too much chaos, and people's opinions are just too different.

So you're saying Tanaka was a figure head for his whole life...which makes him even worse then a failure.

He was the top guy, if he didn't call the shot, and things didn't run through his desk, and he was a "pencil pusher" then he definitely deserved to get fired for that instead.

That's what it means by "It happened on his watch". You're not suppose to sleep, even if you inherited(which he didn't)

And if anyone actually watch the collector's ed DVD "making of" He definitely should have been fired. He pretty much gives a nod of the head to all the controversies that were in the polls.

The truism of "On his watch" is profound since he was the the video game producer. The supposed "super star" position of the gaming world. And they get fame and fortune well because of it.

In fact it maybe more damnation to Tanaka's name because one of the game producer duties is usually the liaison of the development team and the higher management/shareholders. Unless it was unusually different for FF14, then that means Tanaka was the Author Anderson of Enron.

The stake is pretty big because Tanaka's position is that important.

We can call a lot of stupidity that happened in FF14, but if the head-hancho let it happen, it's how it rolls.

Quite obviously you don't have a clear idea of what a producer does. A producer is not the "head honcho", he's not the "top guy". A producer is simply a link between the development team and the executive level of a company. There are variations from company to company and depending on market, but that's the juice of the issue.
It's for sure a position of responsibility, because a producer has to try and mediate between the executives and the developers. But a producer has almost zero final decisional power. If he goes to the executives and tells them "the development team isn't ready" and the executives tells him "them make them ready" he responds "sir, yes, sir!" and walks out of the room to bring the bad news to the devs.

A producer does not decide release dates, he does not decide external deals that may influence release dates (branding, distribution, printing, marketing and so forth). He's pretty much a supervisor, and a supervisor is not the boss.

I find it funny that so many people rile on tanaka, when he wasn't even the game director (that was Komoto), and so didn't even take the majority of the gameplay decisions concerning the game.

By the way, tanaka wasn't a producer "his whole life", before he has been a coder, a designer, a battle director and a game director of many games. Including absolute masterpieces like Seiken Densetsu 3 and Xenogears. I would say that "failure" doesn't really describe him.
Mind you, producers that come from that background tend to be the best, as opposed to the ones that come from a marketing/sales background.

Again, you don't really know how things went. So you're basically pointing fingers at random.

[Zenaku]

I am in favor of Tanaka's efforts to make a completely new and original idea

I am strongly against Yoshida's efforts to change that

Edit: Might seem off-topic, but it's not. Tanaka probably considered FFXI to already be what FFXI players wanted. He didn't expect over 70 percent of FFXIV's player base to be made up of FFXI players. In an article somewhere before FFXIV's release, FFXIV was inspired by newer generation mmorpgs that were already out, such as World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and Warhammer Online. They did their research, they just didn't expect a large number of players to expect another FFXI.

Tanaka had the right thinking: why make the same game when the same game is still going strong?

The way he should've been thinking however was: how did sequels of other mmorpgs turn out?

Tanaka had the right idea i think he just needed more time and the stockholder and CEO want the game to be release before it's time. If tanaka had time and release the game around 2011 Q2-Q3 this game would have been better off.