Housing: What the ENG forums are trying to do won't work

[Belisaire]

You guys need to remember that this is still a Japanese MMO that was made entirely with Japanese players in mind. Most Japanese companies legitamitly don't really care about their consumers outside of Japan (cause they make the vast majority of their profits in Japan).

This is a dubious assertion. Might've been true for FFXI. But there's a reason why NA and EU get equal representation when it comes to fan fests. We may have less servers, but each of those servers is packed with players. Remember that it costs a helluva lot of money to fund these events for fan fests. They are not cheap affairs (so SE must believe they are very worthwhile).

Japanese players tend to have higher retention (they stick with the game longer) whereas NA players abandon the game and do other things and then return. But at the end of the day, the NA population remains higher, or at least equal to, the active Japanese player base.

Check out ffxivcensus.com, or someone else's metric for determining the active playerbase for XIV. NA always comes out on top in all estimations. NA is the bigger market and its undeniable. Which is why SE flies Yoshida out to LA for every fan fest, e3, or what have you. It's because we're actually their biggest market. XIV is closer to the WoW model that we invented, after all.

I work in Silicon Valley and in software. If I were SE, and I saw that our biggest customer base (NA) had the weakest retention rate of all regions, I'd be working hard to figure out any way necessary to keep more players subbed each month. The fact that NA is so weak in retention is basically just money wasted for SE.