So SE has officially stated their MMO profits have tanked.

[hydralus]

I totally agree. I also have sprouts on the regular in my roulettes and some of them also mentionhow awesome this game is! I can confirm. Problem is that the current discourse of this game is almost completely dominated by veteran players who have already finished everything in the game and who put in propably 1000-2000 hours. Sometimes those veteran voices drown out all the people which are still going through the story and enjoy it.

Seeing sprouts every time i do Duty Roulette makes me hopeful, because even though compared to other MMOs, this game at least still attracts new people.

With other MMOs I play I don't even know the last time I saw or connected with a new player, because the only "new" characters I often see are alts from veterans.

Unfortunately, nobody's going to invest in making a new MMO when there are so many failures. I've been waiting ages for a new superhero MMO to play and the only one who is even trying to launch looks like absolute garbage. It's either go back to games from 2013 or nothing at all.

[Hallarem]

They got a bunch of new players, instead of working ln keeping them all in. They rushed the story (Endwalker) because of the success. Which makes NO sense at all. And now they are struggling to make anyone interested in their new storylines. You take your time and POLISH if you are successful. You dont RUSH

They did not fix their systems or QoL as a priority and focused on other projects on the side. Because they thought the "new player experience" would keep people hooked and their outdated dinosaur japanese thinking of "we have a product and it stays the same so clients are comfy because people hate change" again. You are NOT coca-cola, you are an MMO. Change is critical, innovation is critical.

What can I say except you get what you deserve. 8.0 is my limit, or if another MMO with better rp features comes along.

This MMO needs a new director who focuses ONLY on ffxiv and the CEO needs to give the director and team more funds and time to innovate.

[Kohashi]

This right here is the real elephant in the room in my opinion.

The game could be so much more if they actually put more of the monies it generates back into the game. It's the definition of stupidity for them to outright acknowledge that FFXIV is their most popular, reliable, product.... and then do the bare minimum to maintain it.

In fact, it's disappointing that they didn't make any attempt to future proof the game (financially) during Covid because the positive impact it had on gaming was never going to last indefinitely.

I personally think the people in charge of the SE direction and investment projects are just poorly informed and out of the loop of what actually happens outside of JP.

The only reason why FF14 managed to be salvaged by Yoshi-P is that he had experienced other popular games outside of JP, and he implemented some of their elements into the game.

I also do not think it's bad to use some of the money other projects generate and try to do other projects, but it seems that the projects they engage with are very poorly thought out and planned. This overall makes me think the people who are in charge of approving the projects and the research around them are very poorly prepared.

This extends into the DT direction as well. There had to be somebody who gave the green light for this radical change.

[PaulH]

It seems a shame they didn’t take the time to work on the infrastructure, netcode and some of the underlying issues that are precluding the game from trying new things, 12+ years of inventory assets and still managing glams, gear etc is a flaming nightmare. The DDR doubling down and 2 minute game loop, homogenisation of job roles, no interplay in jobs, constant simplification and lack of casual enduring content. Totally get that we shouldn’t have silly skills and being busy for busy sake but all the open world is empty and it is wasted. So many things to list. I wanna play more but there is little of interest for me and it just feel annoying to hear take a break, play other games, quit game etc, pfft.

I think we should be able to ear 450 tomes per job type etc

[Vanfrano]

Time to retire the creatively bankrupt "saviour" of the franchise. It turns out you can't lie and manufacture your way to success forever, I'm surprised it took so much time for people to wake up.

[Larirawiel]

I think it's more concerning that literally everything is less profitable than it was before than just the MMO division.

After some NFT-games and so total successes like Forspoken, i am sure, SQEX has a serious management problem. It could kill the whole company.


Cheers

[TheRealDesastr]

New players aren't staying. Everyone I've introduced hasn't remained, & the fact that people need to wait to play with their friends, blocked by an MSQ a majority of people do not like (in terms of DT) is abysmal. To even get to the point of Dawntrail, one has to go through the entire MSQ and that's a huge investment. No one is going to just buy a skip and waste that money for a game they're not invested in yet. Which gets rid of a set of newer folks brought in by older folks entirely.

If we go with 'new player starting off and excited for the story' as well, I still can't see people staying. No matter who I've tried to suggest, they leave, because the slog of ARR is drawn out so much & not captivating at all.

Then, for me, the only thing keeping me is RP, but the fact that rewards aren't account bound and alt-friendliness is illegal here in FFXIV is demotivating. I don't care to have everything on one character and 'all jobs on one' isn't exciting.

WoW has alt-friendliness to offer & now housing, too. What can XIV say that it has that WoW doesn't? Before anyone gets on my case about 'just going to play WoW', I have RP & housing keeping me here in XIV, not any of the 'actual elements' of the game anymore. I don't intend on leaving and my type of player is probably not that common. Most others would just leave at this point.

Also, looking into rewards, WoW has trading post. We get a tiny sprinkle of mounts, pets, & gear every patch cycle & sometimes abysmal rewards relating to holiday events. But that's hoping for 1 mount, minion, emote or outfit(usually just 1) & SOMETIMES furnishings. Otherwise, we need to wait for the long patch cycles to see anything and usually again it's a smaller amount than the monthly things WoW does.

one could argue 'but WoW does a bunch of recolors and is lazy'. Sure. They also had mount collect achievements and all that too. It just...feels pointless to be a collector in FFXIV if things aren't account bound tbh, so that gets rid of yet another element of the game right along with the fact that we just have so little rewards or incentive to keep us logging in.

And that's just it - if you don't have a house keeping you here, what's the incentive to even log in? That's being directed at the general folks, not extreme RPers or anything like myself. (I say extreme given I have dozens of characters, most people don't juggle that). But even if I'm an unusual case, I know other people have alts and don't want to regrind the same things over and over, & may find one thing fitting on a different character but not wanting to slog through all of those locks.

So - there's little incentive for current players. Little incentive for new ones. Nothing of excitement being introduced at all lately while other games like WoW have so much more to offer and now *everything* to offer that XIV does & a LOT more. Only niche players are now staying like myself, and it's worrisome.

[CaptainLagbeard]

After some NFT-games and so total successes like Forspoken, i am sure, SQEX has a serious management problem. It could kill the whole company.


Cheers

Forspoken should have been their biggest lesson on what not to do. But I guess it's too much to expect a company to look at their failures and ask themselves "Why did this fail?"

[TimotheusReed]

If we go with 'new player starting off and excited for the story' as well, I still can't see people staying. No matter who I've tried to suggest, they leave, because the slog of ARR is drawn out so much & not captivating at all.

I always wonder how many of those people are "real" new players to the MMO genre. Because every time people tell me they wanted to bring friends into the game and they left because of ARR it was ALWAYS WoW players.
I honestly don't consider WoW players who try out FF14 as real "new players", because very often WoW players already start most MMOs with the WoW-mindset (which often means rushing to endgame) and don't really approach games like other new players. They often already treat every new MMO they start like WoW.

I honestly rarely see people who played other MMOs or played other games which are not WoW do the same. It honestly seems to me like WoW had ruined the mindset of some its players long-term, which is why many of them usually skip everything and don't even read quest texts.

I had very good experiences with new players who never played WoW and usually those people stuck.

On the other hand I tried to bring two WoW players into this game and they usually rushed the leveling, skipped every cutscene and tried to rush till endgame until they eventually quit.
But I honestly would say they ruined the game for themselves by approaching it with the same mindset they did in WoW.

So I am always interested when someone is talking about "new players" which they tried to get into the game and that quit in ARR, if those are WoW players, because usually I am right.

[ElysiumDragon]

Instead of writing up a 500 line manifesto of thinly-veiled conspiracy theories, or a diatribe on why the devs need to be collectively fired, I'm gonna list the things I don't like about the game, as a 10-year veteran.

1. Gear progression sucks. It's the same system from Heavensward, but with almost double the jobs. There just isn't the time to gear everything unless you're in the dungeon treadmill pretty much every single week for 8 months. There needs to be more ways of gearing jobs both alt and main, and a first good step would be an increase in the tome cap after the first 8 weeks of Savage.

2. Links to the above, but too many timegates. Alliance Raid timegating, Normal Raid timegating, Treasure Map timegating (especially this one), Savage Raid Timegates, Allied Society timegating, etc, etc. Just let people play the actual game, instead of constantly getting in their way. It's an MMO, not a Hoyoverse gacha title.

3. Lack of responsiveness on job changes. Dancer Mains like myself have been asking for Tillana to be fixed since launch, yet it's still annoying to deal with. It's a QoL fix that wouldn't meaningfully change the rotation or cause any balance issues, so why isn't it fixed?

4. A stubborn refusal to adjust older content. The most notable example of this is Eureka Orthos, where a simple -30% HP adjustment to enemies on the first handful of floors would make the content a lot more enjoyable, and wouldn't meaningfully affect balancing for said content. While we're adjusting older content, why don't we also add the Bicolor Gemstone system to every expansion, along with vendors offering rewards for those areas. And hey, while we're in ARR, why not adjust the Zodiac Relic's infamous 'books' stage so that multiple can be active at once? It's still a several-hour grind either way, right?