Fighting Desperately...

[Peptaru]

FFXIV's biggest hurdle is making it to 2.0 so all the people who /ragequit because the game was terrible MIGHT come back. Its a stigma they earned themselves by failing. The brand power of FF has been ridiculously damaged, they USED to have that kind of power, before XIV, before XIII, but now?.... idk.

[ArnoMorley]

FFXIV's biggest hurdle is making it to 2.0 so all the people who /ragequit because the game was terrible MIGHT come back. Its a stigma they earned themselves by failing. The brand power of FF has been ridiculously damaged, they USED to have that kind of power, before XIV, before XIII, but now?.... idk.

I think brand damage has been happening since X-2, 13/14 were just so much worse that now it's all catching up to them. The biggest reason why the brand is failing is that Sakaguchi is gone. His last FF was XI and look how successful it was, before that his last FF was X. X sold 6.6mil copies okay well the first project after he was gone (X-2) sold 4 million, then 12 sold 5 million and 13 sold 6mil.

That's a bigger decline than it even looks like if you take population growth into consideration. Without him the games weren't nearly as good so they sold a lot less. If he had still been there X-2 would have sold 6 mil+, XII would have sold 7-8 mil+ and XIII might have sold 8-9 mil+. They made him leave because the spirits within lost $120mil, but not having him there this past decade cost them at least $300mil and that's not counting FFXIV failing.

FF is not the same brand it was. Star Wars is still a strong brand because Lucas is still there, Final Fantasy had it's head cut off and most of it's team stripped away. SE just throws in a bunch of nobodies to take their places.