Quote Originally Posted by Zaaku View Post
This is what boggles my head meats. SE went against the grain with FFXI. It never competed with WoW. Instead it funneled a niche into its ranks and thus avoid the inevitable bloody gruesome fate that awaits any MMO that tries to tackle WoW. The game was a finical success and made steady profits over 7 years.

Why. Why after seeing company after company after company after company spend years and millions of doll hairs on their own flavor of the month MMO WoW clone shit their pants, drop to the floor, and suffocate in their own drool would they emulate their parameters?
The answer is in your post... (WARNING: This will be long, so only read if you are genuinely interested in the answer)

FFXI 200-300k subs
This is no longer good enough. Investors will *not* bother with a number that small when they could just go over to blizzard and dump their money there. FF is not the only contender on the scene, there are tons of game being developed to rival WoW. The only reason investors are considering them is because investors are naturally greedy creatures and would rather catch something at the bottom, instead of the top. They love to ride underdogs that turn into real giants. Thats exactly what WoW did, and all of those investors are happy ass campers.

But it was also timing. When FFXI came out in Japan, WoW was just a rumor. When FFXI reached North America, WoW hadn't even started beta testing (well maybe alpha but idk). Both games came out in NA in 2004 (FFXI in March, WoW in November). In other words, a game like FFXI was possible because it was a time when mmorpgs were still a niche thing. Yes Everquest was really popular at the time, but only amongst mmorpg enthusiasts, which was a small fraction of the population. It would make perfect sense to an investor that games like FFXI, which commanded a loyal fanbase of its own through its franchise, could grab a fat share of the mmorpg subscriber population. The same goes for WoW, which was in the same boat, since it had loyalists from its Warcraft franchise. In other words, the market was ripe for opportunity, the franchise label made risk-taking (ie going against the status quo) perfectly acceptable for investors; there had not been major widespread success before that point. At worst, only the loyalists will play those games which would still give a reliable increase in revenue.

But now it is different! We know how the battle turned out; WoW unquestionably won. Both WoW and FFXI went against the grain, but they targetted two different demographics. FFXI appealed to the same rpg enthusiasts/nerds that games like everquest, asheron's call, nwn, had appealed to. What it offered that was different was a combat system based on its console rpg games. Additionally it added the whole job/subjob thing, as well as the ability to be played on a console as well as a pc. This made the interface/menus less than desirable to most ppl, and the combat pacing was much different than the standard. All in all, it managed to capture a fat chunk of the mmorpg population as investors had predicted.

WoW, on the other hand, went the opposite direction. It aimed a product not at rpg enthusiasts, but at the general school-age public. It was pretty genius the way they did it, from the cartoony graphics, to the simple and linear quest progression storyline. The result was millions of subscribers. Rather than directly compete with the other MMO's, they tapped into a larger market where there was no competition: the casual crowd. What had made rpg's so inaccessible to people before got erased, and WoW created a game that was as accessible as Super Mario was on the super nintendo. In a way you could say its the Super Mario of MMORPGs.

The result is that WoW set the standard for all future endeavors. Anyone who hopes to make their investors happy has to compete with WoW. You have to offer a game that can legitimately capture WoW subscribers. That means RPGs are now having to battle it out over casuals, and not rpg enthusiasts. Casuals are the larger market, generally have the most money, and more easily sustain a company's cash flow. If a few hundred quit its no biggie, as a few hundred more will replace them. In the past, if a few hundred rpg die-hards quit, there was no guarantee they'd quickly be replaced. Long story short, there would be no FFXIV unless SE targetted that larger market. If they refused, their investors would jump ship and SE would lose a LOT of money.