H: What’s kind of ratio in sales do you see between Japan and the world?
Y: About half and half. MMORPG genre is originated in the US and most of the players are from US so if we can’t take US, it’s not going to be worth it. For MMORPG to become major in Japan there are few more obstacles. First is the language barrier. Before Dragon Quest 10, the largest MMORPG with the most subscription in Japan was Final Fantasy XI. Before that was Ultima Online. Dragon Quest 10 has reached 400,000 accounts and was officially announce but even this amount of players played FFXIV that is 400,000 players only. Now comparing this to World of Warcraft in entire world they have recorded about 12,000,000 accounts but out of this the Japanese players for WoW is about 18,000 to 25,000 at peak time. Also there is a new MMORPG title called GuildWars2 but this received 2,000,000 sales instantly, and I see it as current challenge as rival. It’s really well made, but even with that for Japanese players it’s only about 1000 players.
The language barriers is that thick.
One other thing is the financial side. Foreign business culture depends on investments. For MMO if you do it wrong it will cost few billion so to develop a game they receive money from the investors then from their develop lots of new MMO projects. By doing this there is a risk of where at the early stages they go through some hard times and can’t continue or give up fast. On the other side Japan creates the game with their own company. To be able to invest a large amount in one this has a high risk and for large scale MMO I think SE is the only one left (in Japan doing it their way). Because of this result it’s harder to compete and it’s hard soak into Japanese gamers. For foreign MMO’s there are lots of interesting ones out there but they are all in English and if they don’t fix those Japanese players not wanting to learn English it will be hard to absorb.
H: Since Japanese players don’t know much about WoW, you could probably copy it and make them go “Wow this is fun”.
Y: I think that’s OK. Since FF11 was a project developed by the staff who got really into “Everquest” and went “Let’s make FF version of this”. On top of that in FF11 they brought in scenario and production so it was highly valued even in overseas. Next the foreign MMORPG’s took that feature that was highly valued and expanded on that. Just like before, it started with “Wizardy” they “Ultima” then “Dragon Quest” then “FF” was born, that cycle still goes on. I think it’s alright to start building from global standard. However it’s really important for it to being FF, it needs Chocobo’s and Moogles and Dragoons, and dramatic scenarios where you meet and say goodbye, have airships, and where everyone can fight primals. I think that’s good, of course it needs more but to start with those.
H: Isn’t FF14 going to take the direction “Diablo” or “WoW” has with small characters all mashing up?
Y: Nope, this game was launched once already, even for ARR it needs to keep some key parts. We chose to fix the same FF14. I was thinking to develop an MMORPG is at average 2 years but it was actually 5 years. When thinking it was done in half the time, starting from zero to bring up to par with other titles we needed to make some selections from the base FF14. When looking over the world market for MMORPG there isn’t any title that has character creation and character graphics such as FF14. With this body proportions and realistic look, the feel of the gear. I think FF14 would be the only one that can keep on going with this quality, I believe this part we can definitely win in, so I think it’s better to push this part out more. As I shown during the live broadcast earlier the LOD (Level Of Details: The rendering method used to control depending on the camera distance.) We worked particularly on the silhouettes so even if you change from High to Low polygon you can hardly tell the difference.