The answer to the question everyone has been asking.

[Gemina]

They're not as successful because they're constantly making poor management decisions. Greenlighting massive, expensive projects only to cancel them mid project (FF Versus), barely advertising what they do put out, and then setting expectations so high and not meeting them (Tomb Raider anyone?)

Creating new in house engines(read: expensive) instead of using tried and tested engines. Then scrapping the new engine and going to the tried and tested engines they should have been using from the start.

They've made questionable and even outright bad decisions, sure. Who hasn't? They've also shown to have the aptitude to make said mistakes and learn from them. FFXIV is host of tried and true, and trial and error. The franchise wouldn't be successful at all if it wasn't doing the majority of things right. While everything you said is true, it should also be said that SE delivers a product that has competitors. Strong competitors. That is why I mentioned the SE faithful as a cult, because it's such a small population in comparison to say, the first-person-shooter playerbase.

Of course, this is all the more reason to not make the mistakes that SE does. They don't have the same amount of leisure to allow projects to fail like some other companies out there, which is why the seemingly dart-throwing method to finding solutions needs to stop.

[MicahZerrshia]

I definitely think we could be more understandable instead of standing around shaking a finger.

We are consumers and SE is anything but an indie developer. We don't need to be understanding, esp with a game that has been out as long as XIV has, by now they should have been able to develop multiple kinds of content as well as worked the bugs out of them. But telling a playerbase to be understanding to a multimillion dollar company who hasn't done anything innovative with a game outside of how they spin the same ol same and dodge any sort of reasonable questions does not deserve sympathy, East or West, from people who are paying exorbitated amounts of money considering its a game with a box cost and a sub, as well as the other things they wanna charge us for.

When you make an MMO or any game there should be a period of understanding by the playerbase post launch to get bugs worked out and such, but certainly not this far out and certainly not for a company of this size. You are basically saying that we should all be apologists and white knights and that is even more unhealthy to a game and a game company than being critical. And I believe one of the reasons the playerbase is so critical is because they refuse to open any sort of dialog with us. All Yoshida does is answer pre-approved questions that make XIV sound like the most amazing game ever or simply refuses to answer.

A game developer in 2018 should be able to answer questions that have been asked for years instead of hiding behind a curtain and acting like everything is fine and dandy when clearly its not.

[Ramesses]

It doesn't help that FFXIV lost 220,000 Western subs(NA and EU) since January 2018. That's a lot of money. 3.3M a month...

Interesting... can you cite a source for that? I need to compare that with something else I read.

[Magic-Mal]

Interesting... can you cite a source for that? I need to compare that with something else I read.

In the "Please Stop Making Eureka" thread. Page 21. First post, my post. It's a series of screenshots of the LuckyBancho censuses from January 27th to November 3rd

[Paladinleeds]

In the "Please Stop Making Eureka" thread. Page 21. First post, my post. It's a series of screenshots of the LuckyBancho censuses from January 27th to November 3rd

To help Ramesses along his way, here is a permalink to said post

[Soraki-Muppe]

SE is not an indie company, they should support FFXIV so that it can bring in more money. Not strip it of resources until more and more players leave. which ironically will result in there being less money to strip away in the future.
5.1 will be when I decide to stay or leave, one patch into a new expansion will show how they move in quality and quantity.
If this current trend continues I will vote with my wallet, I will decide to use my money elsewhere just like it seems SE has decided to use way to much of our sub money elsewhere.

[Ramesses]

In the "Please Stop Making Eureka" thread. Page 21. First post, my post. It's a series of screenshots of the LuckyBancho censuses from January 27th to November 3rd

Awesome, thank you... I needed that.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

They've made questionable and even outright bad decisions, sure. Who hasn't? They've also shown to have the aptitude to make said mistakes and learn from them. FFXIV is host of tried and true, and trial and error. The franchise wouldn't be successful at all if it wasn't doing the majority of things right. While everything you said is true, it should also be said that SE delivers a product that has competitors. Strong competitors. That is why I mentioned the SE faithful as a cult, because it's such a small population in comparison to say, the first-person-shooter playerbase.

Of course, this is all the more reason to not make the mistakes that SE does. They don't have the same amount of leisure to allow projects to fail like some other companies out there, which is why the seemingly dart-throwing method to finding solutions needs to stop.

What exactly have they learned? Kingdom Hearts 3 may finally get its release come January after spending over a decade in developmental hell, FFVII: Remake has currently taken up residence in said hell, they just lost 30M due to their horrendously poor handling of FFXV and its subsequent DLCs and are still too damn stubborn to license Unreal 4/Unity when their attempts at an in-house engine have been embarrassing. Square Enix is a company that practically underlines the definition of insanity. They make good games, but they stumble all over themselves just to get there.

[Liam_Harper]

Blizzard are under the same issue tbh. The suits are good at squeezing profit out of things, but have no concept of what a good or bad game is and don't consider what earned the company that monopolizing place in the market in the first place. Things like the first 2 WoW expansions or FF7-10 were created by gamers, with a strong passion for gaming who wanted to tell epic stories and share epic gaming experiences. And that's what customers truly loved and why the games became massive successes.

Game companies today are too focused on how to entice the player to spend, how to trigger our addictions or how to trick us into spending more than we normally would. This works insanely well short-term but has no long term future. The company gets a bad reputation and starts to dwindle and relies even more heavily on monetization and microtransaction which only speeds the decline.

The suits in charge need to stop and give their developers free reign. Imagine a dev team that were allowed to upgrade the servers, the network, work indepth on combat, story, customization and graphics and given the time needed to test and release a fully finished product. It'd be a massive success.

I don't feel the age of MMO gaming is drawing to a close. I feel there's actually a big opening in the market right now for a passionate teams of gamers who love making games to step up and create an entirely new game made for gamers and not profit. They'd sweep the market right now.

[Magic-Mal]

To help Ramesses along his way, here is a permalink to said post

I forgot we could do that..