Ffxiv monthly sub isn't stretching & response to PCGAMER article

[Voidmage]

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I’ll be honest with you and I don’t mean it in a bad or rude way because I wished it was like that too.
I have the feeling you want the old gaming times back when every game was a finished product and not life service.
Those times will not come back. The market changes and if things like Dragon Age are an indicator then everything will just get worse.

I think we fundamentally disagree on the topic of gacha because your whole text about how gacha sacrifice gameplay or that those games only have a short honeymoon phase are exactly not what is happening.
Fate go goes for years now stronger than ever, Genshin lives of the gameplay of overworld exploring and HSR has so many different game modes alone in events it is mind blowing.
I won’t try to change your mind.

Gachas are there and they will continue to exist. There will be bad ones but the industry learned that high quality ones bring in more and Myhoyo has become a global player in the video game industry as is china itself.
These games survive by accepting feedback and evolved to perfectly playable games that are in some parts better than established games.

Either games like FF14 learn to accept feedback and improve their quality like the top gachas or they will sink into obscurity in my opinion because more and more players will see that the other games give more for no to less money and sooner or later a gacha will exist that is the direct competition to the mmo’s. I would even bet right now players here are just waiting for an mmo that gives the old FF14 feeling in optics and play style (and catgirls probably).

One last thing on Suikoden.
Like I said. Getting all characters there is a pain and only done to get the best ending normally. Yes it was a big part of what made it popular but what is its status now? It is dead because the rest of the games was standard jrpg stuff and the characters themself did nothing really. So I don’t understand that comparison. I already played them so why should I do that again?
Collecting characters is not why I play gachas (only those who interest me) but because games like Genshin are just FUN.

That’s all I will say about that all.
Like I said I won’t try to change your mind nor will I defend the worst gacha practices.
But I will defend the good points of those games and stand by the fact that no you do not need to spend money to get all you need in them.

[Raven2014]

I have the feeling you want the old gaming times back when every game was a finished product and not life service.
Those times will not come back.

I gonna slightly disagree here. There is always room for both. What you said is exactly what drive the current AAA crisis. Baldur's Gate 3, Space Marine 2, Black Myth Wukong, Cyberbunk are all example of a complete and finish experience is still highly sought after. I also played a lot of minor AA tittles as well that's perfectly functional and profitable. The reason the market is crashing is despite the high demand for single player, instead of trying to meet that demand, companies want to chase the bigger reward in the over-saturated life service game. And that means if you want to compete in such an environment, you have to be the best or close to the best.

And that's what change with FF14 and I think Yoshi's tone in recent interview. 5-6 years ago he could say with confidence that it's okay for people to stop playing FF14, play other games. He was confidence people would always come back to FF14 because in those time, FF14 was the top dog of the live service space. Your alternative was either WoW, or some 2nd string F2P (like Guildwar) or the yearly Korean F2P slops that you gonna lose interest in 3 months. But these days, that space is heavily contested, not just in number but quality as well. That's why now you see him asking people to give him time, don't retire. No longer you see the "it's ok to quit the game and come back", because if people leave to play other games this time, they may find out there are actually better games out there.


It's not like we haven't been here before. Remember when WoW was at its peak? Everyone declared SP was death .. and for a time ... it was. But not because there wasn't interest, but because every companies decided to abandon it to chase the dream of becoming the next WoW, and that last for a almost a decade. In the end, how many "WoW 2" did we see? None. Not even WoW 2 itself can be the next WoW, what we did have is a mountain of coprse of all the WoW wanna be. Many companies collapse or downscale or bought up. Heck, Bioware was a prime example of this,their gamble with MMO is what led them to be acquire by EA. So what happened after the MMORPG collapse? Single Player came back with a vengeance ... until Overwatch and Fornight came out, and the chase to become the next Overwatch begin. And honestly, we're probably at the end of that cycle now with so many live service failing. Ironically in a way I find the Hoyoverse games like Genshin in this cycle is similar to what FF14 is in the previous cycle. Just like FF14 is one of the very few survivor and eventually flourish from the "next WoW race" by finding the right balance between casual and hardcore. Games like Genshin and FGO set up to be the winner of the "next Overwatch race", and it did so by finding the right balance between F2P and monetization.

Like I said, the people arguing against us will never want to acknowledge it, but pre-datory or not, games like Genshin success because it's simply a good product. I mentioned that even now, we still get a yearly dose of Korean MMO/F2P slops. Gacha or not, most people know a pile of shit not worth their money when they see one. If the majority of gamers is as gulliable as these people are making them out to be, I figure the top ten chart in the last decade would have been dominated by "predatory" Korean F2P. I tried the last Descandant for 2h, uninstall and never looked back. I play WuWa for almost a month before deciding dropping the first 5$, because the combat, the exploration, the writing were all a league above FF14. It was like someone who eat beef jerky his whole life bite into steak the first time. And none of this has anything to do with the "Gacha" system.


Like I said, I implore people to try it out for a month. Don't worry about money, don't even worry about the Gacha stable such as "pulling new character". Just play the game for the shake of exploration. After you finish exploring the first 2 zone in Wuwa, I'm pretty confident you will find it's extremely difficult to come back and stomach the open world "exploration" in FF14. See, I'm not asking FF14 to include Gacha, but I want the FF14 dev to go play Wuwa and see the fact that engaging, interesting, meaningful, and varied open world content is not a myth. And guess what, it's a new game, it's a new story. Each characters are given a roughly 3h story arch and they are all come out better than the you know who NPC that took up a whole 40hours in DT!

[Hallarem]

Lot of gambling money and preying on people wanting the newest "hot character" funding the success and development of the game.
It's a waifu collector with gambling mechanics, all of them are. Good gameplay sure, good story, sure.

Do yourself a favor, and never try these games, save your money. You hear these people talk about "F2P is the way" while dropping "When I dropped my first 5 dollars" in the next sentence.
It's the scummiest way to monetize and hooks you in. Protect your bank and be wary of harpoons, brothers and sisters. The Emperor protects.



Also the logic of comparing gacha lootbox mechanics gambling games of chance VS direct purchases where you know what you get is the wildest take I've ever heard.
If this is a troll, it's the best one I've seen in a while, it's totally devoid of logic and some under the bridge topsey turvey trickery.

Spending a hundred dollars abusing gambling addicts and young people who want waifus on pulls to get a character you like and materials you like to skip PURPOSEFULLY GRINDY MECHANICS vs buying a 5 dollar shirt on a cash shop, like buying a 5 dollar shirt in a real shop. I WONDER WHICH IS MORE PREDATORY, HMMMMMMM! I wonder which company makes more money for development HMMMMMMMMMMMM!
I'm not even arguing which game is better, that's up to opinion, but trying to gaslight the forums into thinking gambling is somehow on equal level to direct purchases is some wild copium whale-oil merchantry.