Because that's the exact same time they could have trained those same people to be part of the main dev team doing main game content and get infinitely more mileage out of them.
It's an opportunity cost. For a project of this massive size, you can't just bring on more programmers & designers and have them up and running in a short time; it's called Brook's law, and it's something I have too intimate experience with due to impatient publishers when I worked at gaming studios. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
Each person added takes a long time to get productive and up & running with the project, sometimes detrimentally due to the fact current devs have to waste time they'd have otherwise spent programming to train the new guy, show him where stuff is in code libraries, answer questions, eyc. If they have to spend that time taking a while setting up this 'collab team', they're just going to just train them to be a part of the main game team and get infinitely more mileage out of them.
That being said, programming and design is only the half of it. Collabs aren't just simply 'company X approaches company Y' and they get the collab rolling. These things take months to years of legal planning, drafting documents, working out terms and co-jointly designing the content in question. That even assumes the other company -wants- to collab at all. It's why you see the vast majority of FFXIV's "collabs" are from other Square properties that skip 90% of the legal issues because they own the other IP as well, such as Ivalice, NIER, Dragon Quest, FFXI, etc.
That being said, Square doesn't benefit much from collabs in the first place. Collabs aren't meant to give the players fun toys, glamour, etc. They're meant to drum up interest in the other product as its primary function. With how massive the FF14 fanbase is these days due to the huge influx of players recently, Square has little to gain from collabs in the first place. If anything, collabs can actually cause negative issues for Square since it could draw players away from FF14, A subscription based MMO.



Reply With Quote




