FFXIV's content vs FFXI's ?

[Mishakai]

Uh..all of their games were rushed out the door and unfinished.

They all took over a year for us to get an update to their storylines.

None of their games were popular.



Or they get the game up to speed, release it for PS3, start the P2P service and like FFXI, make up the money in 1-2 years and begin making a profit off of it?

That works too.

Yeah that would work, except for one thing. During the first year and a half of XI's existence, they were charging a monthly fee to fund the ongoing work.

Sounds like a race against time to me. They need to get the game up to a quality level that justifies charging people monthly without having a sizable portion quit, and they need to do it before they run out of funds from the box sales, otherwise they need to pull the money from other projects, or take out a loan... I don't know about you, but I don't think XI players would be too happy if all of a sudden theiry monthly sub fees went to fixing XIV rather than maintaining XI.

[Elexia]

Yeah that would work, except for one thing. During the first year and a half of XI's existence, they were charging a monthly fee

They also refunded us during the first few months due to instability and poor playability.

Also FFXI has been funding SE's projects since 2005.

[Abriael]

That's what you were saying 6 months ago.

And I was right then as much as I am now.

Yeah that would work, except for one thing. During the first year and a half of XI's existence, they were charging a monthly fee to fund the ongoing work.

FFXIV had a ton of branding deals with PC manufacturers at launch. Those deals aren't small money. I'm quite inclined to say, actually, that something like that probably brought in more cash than subs fees from the Japanese-only playerbase before the NA release in FFXI (minus the second month that was waived because of the state of the game).