Money this game makes

[Fyrebrand]

No company would put all it's single profits back into that single product. The money they make on FFXIV goes to the company as a whole.

This. The truth is, we have no way of knowing how much of FFXIV's profits go directly back to funding the game, and Square Enix is never going to tell us. However, it's certainly not 100% of profits, and probably not even a majority of the profits.

I do get the sense that FFXIV is being seriously invested in and supported by the company though -- indeed, they'd be fools not to since FFXIV is an extremely profitable game and has the potential to remain that way for a long time. There are only a handful of games in the world that can still survive under the monthly subscription model, so simply having that alone is an insane amount of revenue even before cash shop purchases enter the picture. Square Enix has every reason to keep this a game that players want to remain subscribed to.

One of the strengths of FFXIV, I think, is that it has a strong and focused creative vision put into it, and devs that are personally invested and passionately committed to it. There comes a point where throwing more money at the game doesn't actually get more work done -- because, where does the money go? Either you just pay your workers more money for the same amount of labour (maybe they ought to, I dunno), or else you hire more and more staff and risk bloating the team to an unmanageable level. I guess the question is, can Yoshi-P and other senior devs manage more employees while still maintaining the creative standards they want to, or does everything become too big that it becomes the out-of-control development hell of FFXIII and FFXV?

Let's be real here: Profits from Final Fantasy 1 did not go into making more Final Fantasy 1.

Come on now, that's not a valid analogy and you know it. Every video game at the time was a physical, stand-alone product that had no way of being updated, patched, or expanded. Final Fantasy wasn't even an established series at that point, just an experimental game they didn't know would be a success or not. Making Final Fantasy II at all was as much "making more Final Fantasy 1" as anyone could have expected, so it shows the original game was profitable enough that Square saw fit to invest in more of "that," whatever they thought "that" was at the time.