Quote Originally Posted by Xeronia View Post
Dawntrail released ( Early Access June 28th) July 2nd and the first major content update in Early November.

WoW: The War Within released ( Early Access August 22nd) August 26th and the first major content patch is the anniversary event starting on October 22nd.
So that's 2 months for WoW. There used to be a 3.5 month gap for FFXIV in the past but now they account for holidays to give a better work-life balance, making it about 4.5 months.
Now you can make a lot of complaints about WoW but the point here is they have nailed a far better content cadence
What you may not be aware of is that their content cadence used to be notoriously bad. People used to say WoW took 9 months or more for a major content patch. What changed was they recently bought a company with 100 employees and reassigned those employees to work on WoW.

The reason they had to do this was because they were actually struggling to hire (good) developers. I don't know why that is - maybe their situation in the media at the time, but also there was a practical issue that to work for them people have to live in close proximity. The benefit of buying it was they were all in close proximity, ready to go, and had experience.

So you see, WoW was in a much worse boat patch cycle-wise before you played it. So if Square Enix were to replicate their methods, they would want to look to buy out a game developer with 100 employees so they can skip things such as hiring and (to some degree) training.