Why do you think FFXIV is performing so badly form the content creation side?

[FoxyAreku]

This isn't a very fun game to watch, just to play.

[TeraTyrantShadic]

Okie in all honesty Shadowbringer's story is *Mwuah* a good thing, but yeah it seems the idea well is drying out. That or a more reasonable explanation would be we have just barely recovered from the pandemic, we are still in the fallout phase from it and still recovering and I am sure japan is starting to slowly get back on its feet with the whole of asia. However they still have yet to address the Blue Mage issue of which being implementing it as a normal job.

[Hazama999]

Gonna chime in with the others when I say that this game ain't all that much fun to watch.
Would rather be playing it.
At best, I could have a streamer in the background as I do other stuff. Even then, I don't think I've found a single content creator I actually care to listen to.

[Cilia]

At least part of the problem has been underfunding; the director / producer has stated multiple times corporate doesn't give them enough money to develop everything they want to.

The other I would wager is attempting big content pieces that ultimately flopped. The Diadem was supposed to be a big important new thing, but it kind of flopped big time. Since then they've tried using its general design for other things (the various Eureka segments, and the soon to be released Bozjan Southern Front) that have had varying degrees of success. Furthermore they've shifted focus away from so much dungeon content and towards a greater variety, with things such as Ocean Fishing and Deep Dungeons. YMMV on how successful it is, but it's not as if there's a lack of content in the game.

(And BLU is too versatile to be a full proper Job. If it were implemented as such they'd need to cut corners somewhere, and not wanting to do so is the entire reason it's limited.)

[DPZ2]

However they still have yet to address the Blue Mage issue of which being implementing it as a normal job.

They never intended to implement it as a normal job, they went out of their way to tell you it wasn't a normal job, it is a non-issue. Just because you'd like it to be a normal job doesn't mean they have to address that issue. You knew what you were getting in the first place. You can dislike it, and that's fine, but there is no problem for them to address at this point.

[Darsien]

This isn't a very fun game to watch, just to play.

Neither is Runescape, but it's a smaller playerbase with a bigger viewerbase than FFXIV. Larger content creators, too.

It's really just an excuse. The real reason is that casual players don't consume out-of-game content about said game. As casual players make up the vast majority of the playerbase, viewership and engagement in out-of-game content is low.

[InkB]

WoW has been there since the beginnings of streaming. When twitch started to really go big, so did WoW. And WoW had arena to stream. So thats one of the reasons why it still stays there.

MMOs are generally not very intresting to watch. Specially not anymore.

You need huge personality to get lot of people intrested watching people afk in Eulmore for 20 mins to get into dungeon roulette (and no one wants to watch Satasha so they skip leveling roulettes for that reason, lets be real). Sure they could heal the dungeon but who wants to see someone spam holy for 20 mins?

People want constant action. The more action the less streamer has to keep people entertained. And no im not saying it just like "kids these days with their snapit tikitoks".

MANY genres suffer from this. It has to be easy to understand as someone who has NO idea about the game.

[ElciaDeiLinus]

I play a fair bit of WoW, and from time to time watch it- and there's basically two things that tend to get a lot of views. The first is pvp, which FFXIV is really never going to get much of an audience there.

The second is exploiting. Not necessarily cheating, but using game mechanics to do things like one shot bosses, one shot people in arena, stack corruptions/broken traits to do insane things. It's in a way enjoyable to watch a streamer just go around absolutely destroying everyone like a boss, and there's numerous streamers that do this sort of stuff a lot and are very, very popular for it.

Unfortunately, it's not fun in game to be on the receiving end of it, and it's ultimately the result of a very poorly balanced game. FFXIV is too well balanced and doesn't have enough broken stuff that turns players who abuse certain things into gods to be interesting to watch. We're nearly at the end of BfA and all sorts of broken stuff you could do with corruptions almost a year ago is still possible because Blizz doesn't care about balance in the slightest. (there's a video made very recently of a raid of DKs abusing pvp talents to be able to do enough damage in pvp to one shot mythic N'zoth- it's funny, but, it's also utter BS that this kinda thing can go months or even years frequently before Blizz fixes it)

There's a reason in classic WoW almost every streamer for the first few months (before interest died) were either warriors or UD frost mages- because they own to an absurd degree, and it's fun to watch mage destroy three other players or a warrior crit chain two shot three people in a row. Then you actually play classic wow and it's nothing but getting wbuffs then logging out until your raid and boosting to 60 so you don't have to actually play any part of the game but the raids.


Reality is- people like watching uneven fights, in WoW if the game is your literal job and you're getting funneled gear/gold by fans you can be disgustingly more powerful than the average player, and it's fun to watch someone act like they're good at the game because they're so geared up everyone else is fodder. If WoW was well balanced and didn't have all sorts of trinkets and abilities that can randomly go off and just one shot someone, it would be considerably less interesting to watch- at that point it's just obsessive pillar humping and attrition battles in arena. Even if you do pvp in FFXIV and WoW, you can far more easily show off your skill in WoW by grinding a full corruption set with the right traits that makes you unstoppable, you can't really boost out your gear in that way in FFXIV so you'll just never appear to have the same skill gap between yourself and other players.

Not to mention, WoW requires a lot of 'not playing' the game in order to play the game. Long queues for everything, long flight paths to get anywhere- people start doing other things while they're stuck doing nothing in WoW constantly. And what about raiding? You wanna do it in WoW- you best watch a video. There's a thread on the beta forums right now about players getting kicked in SHADOWLANDS BETA dungeons because they don't know all the mob skips, and ever since M+ if you go into a group without knowing all the exploits to bypass mobs expect to get cussed out or see the group fall apart even if it's doing well. Up until recently too, there was no indication outside of DBM what most bosses do or how to handle it- so you had to look up vids on how to do anything since the game gave you poor or no indicators. So WoW both gives you the time to watch other stuff, and you're basically required to do so.

FFXIV, even without DBM the mechanics are usually indicated well enough that you can figure stuff out just by playing the game. You're generally not going to get booted if you don't know a dungeon inside and out before you step in it, and since there's a story to everything most players aren't going to want to spoil a dungeon/raid ahead of time. There's not really anything to spoil in WoW- people are already trying to get their eyes on every SL to completely know it all before it's even out, because the majority of WoW players don't care much about its awful storytelling. Going into new content or a new xpac in FFXIV though and I'd avoid content creators like the plague since I've greatly enjoyed experiencing the story for myself in this game.

[Luna-M]

Terms of streaming this game, it's isnt very fun to watch. I don't play much wow but it at least entertaining to watch.

[Sabrenn]

I don't know about you but this doesn't seem very friendly towards streamers

only to use music as it is incorporated in FFXIV;
not to replace the FFXIV music with third party music when showing gameplay;
not to play FFXIV music alone (i.e., without accompanying gameplay footage) or with third party content;

This is a huge problem, because some fights like the Epic of Alexander have copyrighted music that triggers the twitch muting mechanism which means your whole video is quiet, yet you're not allowed to play other music on top. That's going to be pretty boring to watch 3 hours of quiet gameplay.

to immediately comply with any request by Square Enix to remove any Materials, in Square Enix's sole discretion;

As we've seen (the reason why doesn't matter, just how they deal with these issues), they will not tell you specifically which video to remove to protect players. So how are you supposed to know how to fulfill those requests? Just delete the channel if you're a FFXIV streamer? Doesn't seem enticing.

not to combine or synchronize the Materials with third party content (e.g., a mash-up), but you may include the Materials alongside third party content (e.g., before or after in the same video) as long as you also have permission from the original copyright owner);

This one is kinda vague in my opinion, but it could just be me misunderstanding. How I read it, you're not even allowed to have stuff like stream raiders playing in an overlay on your stream while playing FFXIV or even just a youtube video. Only before or after gameplay.


I think this is the actual reason.

We know they watch world first races as they've mentioned it before and those streams have plethora of mods and ACT callouts and music changes, but smaller streamers usually don't get that privilege of passing through the ToS.

Honestly I wish they got rid of the grey area. Is it allowed or not? Can I play the game music on stream or not? I tried to stream a few times but ending up with hours of muted content when others skirt by with no issue is really demotivating, so I just stopped.