Quote Originally Posted by Andy_T93 View Post
So you are saying that no company anywhere on the globe has managed to acquire servers in the last 18 months. Like there aren't even any to rent?

Or maybe its just that Squeenix are to cheap to pay the inflated costs of the shortage
Actually that's somewhat accurate. Most of the world moved to "Just in time" shipping and fabrication, so completed products such as Servers or PCs (and even intermediate products such as GPUs) aren't built and kept in storage for indeterminate amounts of time until someone buys them. Warehouse space costs money after all.

Instead, these things are made as needed for orders placed. This works all well and good and fine when the shipping and fabrication infrastructure of the world is stable and healthy, the supply chain flows and parts get where they need when they need. However when the supply chain is disrupted by anything, such as a global pandemic or a natural disaster, the entire system falls apart.

If you've ever taken a flight somewhere and seen delays across an airport, think of it kinda like that. Flight A is delayed, because Flight A's plane was going to be used for Flight B then Flight B has to be delayed. Flight B carries something that *needs* to be on Flight C (mail, a VIP passenger etc), so Flight C gets delayed. And so on and so forth down the system. Delays or disruptions anywhere in the system affect huge portions of the system.

So no one stores built and unused servers in a warehouse somewhere anymore, and the supply chain to get the parts to build new servers is disrupted to hell. Which results in huge delays getting servers or computers. Even end users are affected by this, if you've bought a computer in the last 6 months you've almost certainly had the fabrication and shipping delayed because of the same problems (I had a tower I bought back in July not end up getting shipped until October, simply because you couldn't get the parts). Square Enix isn't immune to these issues just because they're a global corporation, if anything they're more susceptible to them! Especially because this is an issue of hardware, and Square Enix is a software company. They do not (and should not) stockpile hardware beyond their immediate needs.


That being said, some of these launch issues would still be present even if the supply chain wasn't bent and battered to all hell. There would still be queues, and crashes and issues. They would just have been less severe. Keep in mind that this is an unprecedented launch (far more concurrent connection attempts than the system has ever faced before) in the middle of an unprecedented supply chain crisis. But I won't sit here and pretend this would have miraculously been the smoothest launch experience ever in the history of MMOs if the supply chain crisis wasn't a thing. It would have been smoother, absolutely, but there would still be rough patches.