Consider FFXIV on XBox

[caffe_macchiato]

Porting FFXIV to Xbox Series S/X should be trivial from a game code perspective. The challenging part is corporate negotiations to allow crossplay and one subscription only.

Xbox has an offer that no other console has in that it’s widely available in stores and is only $300. The base PS5 can only be purchased online and the vast majority of units go for $700 or more. Even the PS4 brand new costs around $300-400 and can’t be bought in store either. How are people supposed to buy a machine to play FFXIV if they don’t currently have one? It only makes sense for it to work on the console that’s most easily within reach for consumers at the moment, otherwise it risks being inaccessible the longer these production delays continue.

As far as performance is concerned, the Xbox would not hold FFXIV back in any significant way. People should be more worried about the PS4, and not for the reasons that you think. If Square Enix drops consoles, you can expect empty servers and long queues. It’s better to have some bad graphics but with a robust playerbase. And given that the Xbox alleviates the concern of performance, there is only upsides to expanding the playerbase (only after they expand servers, of course).

As indicated in Yoshida’s most recent press interview, the developers do read the forums and in all languages, so it’s good for a thread like this to exist to show that a consumer demand for an Xbox port exists.