Square Enix Financial Results Fiscal Year 2025

[brinn12]

FFXIV has been following the same formula for a decade, with its lead director encouraging players to try other games when they feel bored, rather than providing more content to keep them engaged. Each new piece of content has required longer patches. It's no secret that the game could fall back to pre-Shadowbringers numbers and still remain financially sustainable for Square Enix.

That said, Dawntrail sales were still a success, despite a significant drop in subscription numbers. Patch 8.0 will mark the first expansion released after a main story flop, which has traditionally been the primary reason players buy the new expansions. Meanwhile, many long-time players have been driven away by changes unrelated to the narrative, such as the removal of long-term grinds and the oversimplification of content and job design. Losing the MSQ as one of FFXIV's key strengths feels like pulling a rug out, and the full consequences of that may only become clear in 8.0 and beyond.

[Daralii]

FFXIV has been following the same formula for a decade, with its lead director encouraging players to try other games when they feel bored, rather than providing more content to keep them engaged. Each new piece of content has required longer patches. It's no secret that the game could fall back to pre-Shadowbringers numbers and still remain financially sustainable for Square Enix.

That said, Dawntrail sales were still a success, despite a significant drop in subscription numbers. Patch 8.0 will mark the first expansion released after a main story flop, which has traditionally been the primary reason players buy the new expansions. Meanwhile, many long-time players have been driven away by changes unrelated to the narrative, such as the removal of long-term grinds and the oversimplification of content and job design. Losing the MSQ as one of FFXIV's key strengths feels like pulling a rug out, and the full consequences of that may only become clear in 8.0 and beyond.

Them ceding their main selling point over other actionbar MMOs was definitely one of the business decisions of all time.

[Reimmi]

Can't wait for them to make another failure like forspoken or a mobile game instead of putting 10% of that into ff14 to fix the engine

[Striker44]

FFXIV has been following the same formula for a decade, with its lead director encouraging players to try other games when they feel bored, rather than providing more content to keep them engaged. Each new piece of content has required longer patches. It's no secret that the game could fall back to pre-Shadowbringers numbers and still remain financially sustainable for Square Enix.

I think we've finally reached and acknowledged the extremes people will go to that dev teams faced the simple reality that it is physically impossible to produce enough "content" to keep some people engaged. They can spend 2 years developing a full expansion MSQ with over 60 hours of gameplay, and some people will finish it in a week and then complain there's "nothing to do." Put simply - those people made themselves irrelevant, even when they love to get really vocal. Society has done what it always does - changes - and now the focus isn't on people who want to make MMO's their life, but rather one small part of it complemented by other diversions.

[Zelda206]

They can spend 2 years developing a full expansion MSQ with over 60 hours of gameplay, and some people will finish it in a week and then complain there's "nothing to do."

Except now that demographic has expanded because in Dawntrail, there was very little to do in the expansion because most of it was tied behind cutscenes with less than a handful of 'mini games' between them and even fewer dungeons scattered between THOSE. It felt "long" but what did you actually get to do? It's been pretty sparse across the board; what happens when most of the community says there is nothing to do other than to try to attempt Chaotic for the umpteenth time or face going back to try to pump life into older content and the same thing they've been doing and been seeing grow even more stale (such as Job oversimplification)? I'm not saying you're incorrect with your assessment, but it's expanded beyond the small elite percentage and exploded into the casual side as well, and the most casual side is the visual-novelists.

To that end I'd definitely take Yoshida's delightful suggestion and try another game to sink time into. If people got frustrated enough to not care about their houses anymore, subscriptions would plummet like a Shiva struck out of midair.

[Nana_Bear]

...They can spend 2 years developing a full expansion MSQ with over 60 hours of gameplay, and some people will finish it in a week and then complain there's "nothing to do." Put simply - those people made themselves irrelevant, even when they love to get really vocal....

They're never going to please everyone, no one can.

Aside from them NOT trying to "diversify with other games" so much (I understand the fear of having main income off ONE big thing, but they've not found a strong backup yet, IMO, and they throw too much money into those things), I think what they need to do is to look at what their major strengths have been in FFXIV.

Different people will say different things are their favorite, but let's look for a minute at a big clue: what expansion tends to be stated as the biggest number of people's favorite one?

Shadowbringers.

And while there were a lot of great aspects to it, great locations, etc., the biggest hook was that it had a really engrossing story, with some fantastic characters and great character development in already-known characters (eg. the Scions). For many it was the *story* and the *characters* that pulled them along through the game play. Yes I know some people skip ALL cutscenes they can, and some liked other expansions better... but SHB really engrossed the greatest amount of people, from what I can tell. And, unlike several other expansions (especially ARR where they were still finding their way and figuring things out), there wasn't much "run back and forth ridiculously just to give you something to do; most of what we did in SHB had a *purpose*.

I loved some of that in other expansions, but SHB was much tighter with story and character, and the pace wouldn't let you go. Like a good book you just can't put down.

The visual improvements have been fantastic. The back-end work going back and adding in DS/Trust for more and more fights, has helped many. The extra content at times is fun (the EW Manderville questline recruited me; I hated Manderville at the beginning, but by the time we got to EW's I was loving it. That one was a lot of fun!)

I think part of it too is that there's some very long-term problems SE still hasn't addressed---housing and hats/hair for certain races being big ones... and being able to decorate houses, and decorate our characters, IS part of the "side things to do" that a lot of people truly enjoy. (And the lack of response to player outrage over Cosmic Exploration's lack of synching Build Fates to lower population in zone, and added "punishment" for failure of "no Red Alerts/Mech Ops for 8 hours", has enraged a lot of people. Not good.)

So where do they make the most money: with people with short attention spans, or people with longer ones? My bet is the latter.

[brinn12]

I think we've finally reached and acknowledged the extremes people will go to that dev teams faced the simple reality that it is physically impossible to produce enough "content" to keep some people engaged. They can spend 2 years developing a full expansion MSQ with over 60 hours of gameplay, and some people will finish it in a week and then complain there's "nothing to do." Put simply - those people made themselves irrelevant, even when they love to get really vocal. Society has done what it always does - changes - and now the focus isn't on people who want to make MMO's their life, but rather one small part of it complemented by other diversions.

Society has changed? How? Gaming always had both hardcore and casual players, and when a company charges monthly for their servers, people expect content in both quality and quantity because they value their money. You're speaking like it's impossible for SE satisfy both groups. It's not. Most people here ask for a game catering to both, but I doubt this thought ever crossed your mind.

[ElysiumDragon]

Society has changed? How? Gaming always had both hardcore and casual players, and when a company charges monthly for their servers, people expect content in both quality and quantity because they value their money. You're speaking like it's impossible for SE satisfy both groups. It's not. Most people here ask for a game catering to both, but I doubt this thought ever crossed your mind.

People don't hardcore commit their entire lives to a single game anywhere near as much as they did back in the Halcyon days of WoW. That's been the big shift. One solitary game can't meet a demand for infinite and eternally-relevant content, unless the game is built entirely around the concept of 'player-generated content' to begin with.

[Carin-Eri]

That said, the discourse over the idea that Final Fantasy 14 doesn't cater to the hardcore or no-lifer MMO player is odd, because I'm one of the most casual and low-skill people here and yet I've struggled to find things I can do because the game keeps getting harder but I'm not getting better.

I'm in the same boat as you here.