Stormblood Rumored Budget

[Daranion]

So I see a lot of reiterations of this statement over a rumor. I even fell for it linking a quote from someone who had supposedly seen the "source" But after an extensive search through the internet, through interviews, and the copies of the keynote speech AND live letter. I can't find anything. Did people hear this same "source" I did and just ran wild with the assumptions? I even found a webpage linking back to my unsourced quote on this form. Does anyone out there have any proof of this supposed "triple Heavensward budget"

[Rufalus]

It was something on a jp financials site amongst a lot of data and reports. I think. Apparently.

[Belhi]

The basis of the rumor comes from a SE financial report which indicated that Stormblood (which was just refered to as the next expansion at that point) was listed as having a budget of something like 35 million. HW cost 12 million to make. Being unable to read Japanese I cant personally verify if that is true and even then what that 35 Mil is actually spent on is very hard to guess. If they are upgrading all their servers then that might account for quite a bit of the cost.

[Daranion]

Thats the thing, everyone says this, it's a quote that I believed. But upon checking myself, there is no mention of it. Why do people parrot this?

[Medicine]

I think it's mostly hope... I certainly hope it's true! XD

[Zojha]

Thats the thing, everyone says this, it's a quote that I believed. But upon checking myself, there is no mention of it. Why do people parrot this?

Because nobody is able to speak japanese well enough to check, so they put good faith in you?

Look on the bright side, it's not WMDs in Iraq.

[Theodric]

The basis of the rumor comes from a SE financial report which indicated that Stormblood (which was just refered to as the next expansion at that point) was listed as having a budget of something like 35 million. HW cost 12 million to make. Being unable to read Japanese I cant personally verify if that is true and even then what that 35 Mil is actually spent on is very hard to guess. If they are upgrading all their servers then that might account for quite a bit of the cost.

If it is true I imagine a large part of the cost would indeed be towards server upgrades as well as something along the lines of updated options for character creation. Both have been heavily requested in recent years after all. We're in dire need of more inventory space and housing instances at least.

[Medicine]

Snip.

They won't be adding dnc or Viera for 4.0... better character creation is all i have left to hope for! ; ^ ;

[Yeol]

If this is true I hope to see Australia/New Zealand data centers. More or better data centers in general.

[Khubla_Kha]

Regardless of money spent on expansion it's just going to boil down to content being more round arena battlefields with basic jump rope mechanics. This is the formula being followed for the content development of FFXIV.

I mean, I love the story of the game and many of the characters, but when it boils down to it the "end game" content for the game only has one mold and it's quite tiresome. Grinding tomes just to grind tomes because it's the only thing to do is pretty uninspired game design.

Here's to hoping "3x the budget" (this was always a somewhat dubious claim anyhow as nothing solid was ever presented to back it up) equates to better usage of time & assets to create a game that is built for better longevitiy between patches. Something tells me it won't be the case but I am still hoping.