Quote Originally Posted by kikix12 View Post
As for blitzball, I do not understand the worry that Yoshida have. Players will play it once and be done with it?! Then what he plans? We have Fifa and similar sport games that are released EVERY SINGLE YEAR for YEARS now. And those games sell FAST when they are released. The same people buy them time and again and spend hundreds of hours on them. And they are exactly what a blitzball would be. A team-based ball game. Only the rules are different.
Just make sure the play is smooth, the rules are clear, the characters are reasonably balanced and that there is a ranking of sorts, and there may be people playing nothing but blitzball whenever they log into the game. Heck, if they put actual effort into it, there could be people that would buy Final Fantasy XIV ONLY for blitzball. Seriously, sport games are the very first kind of multiplayer games in human history. It is the exact thing that is PERFECT for an MMO. And he worries that it's not suitable?!
You are vastly over-estimating the amount of people that actually care about Blitzball. The FIFA comparison matters little when they're modeled after actual sports and teams, with the main appeal being creating fantasy teams/scenarios. There's virtually no overlap with the FF community there.