The Next Live Letter is on October 31st, which means 7.4 is likely mid December..

[Alicie]

Making other games. It seems like they don't have enough people to make more than one game at a time, so outside of the microtransaction artists, most of the staff are bouncing between projects.

Just drop other games. Nobody wants them, they don't bring money anyway.

[TaleraRistain]

if they havent finished working on it within a week of release, what are they even doing? I do genuinely think they could release 7.4 a week or two early, because we used to have a new patch every 4 months like clockwork, so we know they absolutely could push for a December 2nd release without compromising quality.

Possibly those final touches of QA. Possibly getting the system ready for the update. There are always going to be some bugs, but we have seen an increase in bugs and Yoshi-P acknowledged that in a Live Letter. I forget his exact words but I believe he did indicate it was a lack of proper QA. People, especially higher ups who may be setting company goals, think QA is optional and things can just be released in a partial state and then fixed later but they fail to understand the technical debt they're building into things with that mentality.

[Naraku_Diabolos]

It would be nice if they released it earlier than anticipated, but history suggests they won't, if only because they are such sticklers for a release schedule that puts them at odds with major holidays

Endwalker was delayed and released in early December.

[Wasselin]

I'm not sure why a games release schedule should revolve around holidays. A lot of people have extra time off around holidays and thus would want to play new content.

[FuturePastNow]

I'm not sure why a games release schedule should revolve around holidays. A lot of people have extra time off around holidays and thus would want to play new content.

The only people I see complaining are raiders who have some sort of week-1 FOMO (when these raids will be "current" for most of 2026)

[Amarande]

Just drop other games. Nobody wants them, they don't bring money anyway.

Heh this made me shake my head at the way the games industry has gone.

I still remember when a few tens of thousands of sales was considered pretty decent for a game; now you can sell a million units and be considered a failure that "nobody wants."

TBH, partly, this has to do with the business environment in recent years; there was an article on Gamespot a while back with a former SE exec that was quite an eye opener. Apparently, targets are not merely based on the game being profitable, even significantly so, but also in terms of whether it would have been more profitable if they hadn't made a game at all and instead invested the same money in financial markets.

Given the era of inflation we've had lately ... we should perhaps be only half jokingly fortunate we even still have a video game industry instead of companies pivoting to just being investment firms!

The only people I see complaining are raiders who have some sort of week-1 FOMO (when these raids will be "current" for most of 2026)

This is a player culture issue and I've hued and cried plenty about it and mostly I just manage to annoy people on it, lol.

I'm not sure it's going to abate until, perhaps, social media finally collapses like the house of cards it pretty much is and we go back to the slower team recruitment environment of eld (and that's assuming the newer generation of gamers even sticks with video games at that point and doesn't decide to just abandon them for clubbing or sports or some other quicker gratifying activity ...).

The problem isn't that the content will be gone, the problem is that players have got too efficient at getting in, clearing it, and getting out, and the game has gotten a lot less tolerant of having even one or two folks with two left feet in the DDR.

Keep in mind that mathematically, for an 8 player boss where people cannot be carried, it takes less than 10% of the player pool to not meet the skill bar for more than 50% of randomly selected PUGs to be moot from the very first, which makes PF dilution that much more of an issue than might be thought at first.

... and the only real ways to avoid PF dilution are to get a static (however, statics have declined in popularity - even in WoW with its catechism of guild as sacred for raiding this is the case - and are themselves increasingly the kind of thing where new groups rarely form for a tier after the initial honeymoon weeks) or to base your real life around the game (which is unhealthy AF and I thought we got away from that YEARS ago, remind me, why is the mentality coming back) so that you don't miss patch launch come the Void or Leviathan.

Which means we get "skip Christmas or disband" for the SECOND time this xpac, ugh.

[Heavenchild]

At the moment I don't really care anymore. Meonis LL summary will be enough.
I also don't care when 7.4 releases at this point.

This game is going to die. SE missed it to bring it really up to date (better engine and code) and now it's too late.
Their playerbase is already very tiered from years of waiting and leaves for playing other games.
They can't get all the people back. They ignored player feedback too long.
They can't start 'now' to make it new and stuff. It would take too long at this point.

They killed their golden goose. Maybe I am wrong, but that's what I see. And I have no idea how this could be saved.
I am still around because I am an idiot, I guess.

FF14 for me often feels like waiting simulator. It's less boring to play Power Wash Simulator. :x

[XtremePrime]

At the moment I don't really care anymore. Meonis LL summary will be enough.
I also don't care when 7.4 releases at this point.

This game is going to die. SE missed it to bring it really up to date (better engine and code) and now it's too late.
Their playerbase is already very tiered from years of waiting and leaves for playing other games.
They can't get all the people back. They ignored player feedback too long.
They can't start 'now' to make it new and stuff. It would take too long at this point.

They killed their golden goose. Maybe I am wrong, but that's what I see. And I have no idea how this could be saved.
I am still around because I am an idiot, I guess.

FF14 for me often feels like waiting simulator. It's less boring to play Power Wash Simulator. :x

I'd not be too quick to doompost. WoW was in a very similar position during Shadowlands when most people left to FFXIV. They were constantly accused of not listening to player feedback and even doubling down on the decision to make covenants non-changable, then really punishing to change, and finally after much arguing actually easy to swap. Their argument was that it was a very RPGesque decision that had consequences, but we're talking about a MMO here where players would boot you out of DF if you had the wrong covenant for the class because "muh meta". WoW was in a state of "this is it, the end of the top MMO" and somehow it was able to persist, turn around, shuffle things and now it's back to being in the race against FFXIV. Ebbs and flows. Squeanix will eventually need to shuffle things around sooner rather than later, and things will start picking back up. The MSQ design in the newer patches is already on the right track.

(Unrelated note but Power Wash Simulator is an awesome game!)

[Jason_Ashford]

Endwalker was delayed and released in early December.

that was because of Covid, which skewed everything from Shadowbringers through Endwalker. They also said it was the last time they'd do a major release before a holiday.

[RedLolly]

This is all why I wonder if SE may be pushing towards a new MMO in the Final Fantasy series. The mobile remake team has made Crystal Tower function with a team of 8. FFXIV is actually still doing very well financially and is healthy, but the people of the WoW exodus ran back to WoW as soon as Blizzard got their act together and many quit thanks to the lockdowns ending, while SE fell into the trap many large gaming conglomerates did in fully expecting the numbers to stay very high and not return to exactly where they had been pre-Covid.

I don't think FFXIV is in any danger, but I fully expect this "part two" of the main story to end much, much sooner than the original 14 year long epic we had with 1.0 to 6.0, and that possibly be the conclusion in general.