Very Concerned for the Future of FFXIV and SE

[Minarisweet]

SE has been a pretty scummy corporation for a while now and the playerbase has the lowest bar set for ffxiv anyways so nothing's gonna change.

[Midareyukki]

SE has been a pretty scummy corporation for a while now and the playerbase has the lowest bar set for ffxiv anyways so nothing's gonna change.

People forget that only the FF14 dev team bothered to look presentable. Yoshida going to them in 1.0 and subsequent interactions with the game design-wise were anecdotal in the grand scheme of things.

Square Enix is the company that shoves projects onto Tetsuya Nomura completely out of the blue. And it's the company that swarmed Hajime Tabata with projects and told him to figure them out, usually stuff Nomura couldn't take\finish. It's the company that for the majority of the 2010's was considered really bad and outdated by the gaming community, with their games looking like they were grasping at something to keep up with the competition. And it hasn't stopped being that just because it's gotten successful launches like Shadowbringers\Endwalker and NieR Automata.

[Lily_Skye]

"Square Enix sell Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and several studios to Embracer Group
The $300 million deal includes Crystal Dynamics and Eidos-Montréal"

Square Enix lost $200,000,000 on Marvel games – Avengers will transfer to Embracer Group

lmao

and now they want to do this: Square Enix says the transaction (which was only $300 million) "enables the launch of new businesses by moving forward with investments in fields including blockchain, AI, and the cloud."

[Johners]

My personal expression is this to the developers and Yoshi - I have played your games since I was a child. XIV represents a very special place in the market of games and MMO's. Please, do not allow corporate greed to taint this secret garden we're all enjoying. Please remember what happens to products that fall into the gutter of profits over quality. We have been with you since the launch, supported you through the failure, and cheered you all on during the success - please do not disregard or forget us for Sony's profits.

Except FFXIV is already the soulless cash cow of Square Enix. It's a massive, consistent money maker that's monetised via game licenses (per platform), a monthly subscription fee as well as an optional cash store that's much larger than even many F2P titles. Not to mention the few minions from various pieces of merchandise like buying the soundtrack Blu-rays.

Square Enix have been making a ton of terrible decisions as a company and it's largely bankrolled by titles such as FFXIV making bank and draining money from it. The game is more popular than ever and seemingly isn't get the full resource allocation that it should do. So much more could be done if the funding level actually matched over AAA multiplayer titles like World of Warcraft or Destiny 2, especially when SE are already getting the game design correct.

Sony acquiring Square Enix wouldn't be a bad thing anyway. Sony do a great job with their first party line up and many of the big titles from SE release as PlayStation exclusives before making their way elsewhere. They'd only be reinforcing something that's already a reality, PlayStation being the best/first place to enjoy Square Enix franchises like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts.

Sure, Sony are into live service titles now so it's likely they'd make that additional monetisation more present within FFXIV. Except it already exists in this game so it would just be a case of fully integrating the cash store into the game client like many other MMOs already do regardless of their monetisation model. Realistically the game couldn't get any worse under Sony's ownership with the exception of the Xbox version never being a thing but it's probably not coming at this stage anyway.

[Jaquan]

Except FFXIV is already the soulless cash cow of Square Enix. It's a massive, consistent money maker that's monetised via game licenses (per platform), a monthly subscription fee as well as an optional cash store that's much larger than even many F2P titles.

And yet nothing that the Cash shop offers even remotely grant player meaningful advantage over others considering even level boosts and Story skips don't really mean anything considering the game keeps relatively consistent amount of side content throughout. Despite existing for well over a decade said shop never reached the level of integrity with the game that Blizzard's cash shop did with their WoW tokens or EVE Online did with their Plex (them selling that is the reason why you can attribute real money value to basically everything in that). So I can't really agree that FFXIV can't get much worse because it can. It can get way worse

[Johners]

And yet nothing that the Cash shop offers even remotely grant player meaningful advantage over others considering even level boosts and Story skips don't really mean anything considering the game keeps relatively consistent amount of side content throughout. Despite existing for well over a decade said shop never reached the level of integrity with the game that Blizzard's cash shop did with their WoW tokens or EVE Online did with their Plex (them selling that is the reason why you can attribute real money value to basically everything in that). So I can't really agree that FFXIV can't get much worse because it can. It can get way worse

Not being able to buy Gil directly doesn't make the cash shop any better. There's more items on the FFXIV cash store than there is on the WoW cash store. Character services (like fantasia or a home world transfer) might be cheaper than there WoW equivalents but there's more mounts, minions (pets in WoW terminology) and glamours (transmogs in WoW). Not to mention there's a ton of stuff that WoW doesn't have like paid weddings, housing items, music rolls for estate BGM, dyes for glamours, separate story and level boosts, emotes and chocobo bardings.

Your argument for what's worse is solely based around buying Gil directly despite there being an aggressive form of monetisation elsewhere. The only difference is that the cash store is currently hidden behind a website rather than being directly accessible in the game client. Sure, if Sony were to actually buy Square Enix that would probably change, but that only puts MTX accessibility on par with every other MMO on the market.

Sony aren't stupid and they're investing into live service games for a reason. It's why they acquired Bungie but are largely leaving them alone. Destiny 2 still gets to be Destiny 2 but Sony are keeping that expertise in-house and will likely use some of Bungie's development tools for their other new live service titles. They'd be making, from a business perspective, a smart acquisition move to add Final Fantasy XIV to their first party but it would also give them Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and Dragon Quest (to name a few) entirely.

[Droxybrobotnik]

I for one well and truly don't want to see final fantasy become console exclusive. If we're talking raw revenue then you may recall how monster hunter world crushed the console sales figures when it finally came to pc. There is more money to be made in the pc market, and Sony is trying their best to stop that and get their share of every pie, so if they buy square then expect timed exclusives at best, permanent exclusives at worst. Actually, isn't every new entry now that isn't 14 a timed exclusive? Oh no...

[Johners]

I for one well and truly don't want to see final fantasy become console exclusive. If we're talking raw revenue then you may recall how monster hunter world crushed the console sales figures when it finally came to pc. There is more money to be made in the pc market, and Sony is trying their best to stop that and get their share of every pie, so if they buy square then expect timed exclusives at best, permanent exclusives at worst. Actually, isn't every new entry now that isn't 14 a timed exclusive? Oh no...

It won't become console exclusive though. All of Sony's upcoming live service games will be on PC day one alongside the PlayStation 5 release. Destiny 2, now that Sony own Bungie, will remain on all existing platforms with the expansions releasing at the same time. The only thing that would happen if Sony acquired Square Enix would be the single player games being timed console exclusive to PlayStation and maybe the planned Xbox version of FFXIV gets cancelled entirely (but they last spoke about it years ago so it's probably not happening anyway).

[Payadopa]

And yet nothing that the Cash shop offers even remotely grant player meaningful advantage over others considering even level boosts and Story skips don't really mean anything considering the game keeps relatively consistent amount of side content throughout. Despite existing for well over a decade said shop never reached the level of integrity with the game that Blizzard's cash shop did with their WoW tokens or EVE Online did with their Plex (them selling that is the reason why you can attribute real money value to basically everything in that). So I can't really agree that FFXIV can't get much worse because it can. It can get way worse

That's not how that works. Apart from SE triple dipping they sell you glam in a game where glam is the endgame. Where they sell whales a whale. lol Just because you can't outright buy Gil doesn't make it less exploitative since looking cool (whatever that may end up being) IS more than enough motivation in an MMO. And the cash shop is now accessible from the game and you still see retainers being advertised when you log in. Oh and retainers DO give you an advantage. Buy why solve a problem for free when you can have people pay for the solution. I don't see SE handing out free retainers either.

[Johners]

That's not how that works. Apart from SE triple dipping they sell you glam in a game where glam is the endgame. Where they sell whales a whale. lol Just because you can't outright buy Gil doesn't make it less exploitative since looking cool (whatever that may end up being) IS more than enough motivation in an MMO. And the cash shop is now accessible from the game and you still see retainers being advertised when you log in. Oh and retainers DO give you an advantage. Buy why solve a problem for free when you can have people pay for the solution. I don't see SE handing out free retainers either.

Isn't the monetisation options something like this?

• Game license
• Collectors edition (or optional upgrade)
• Subscription
• Retainer service
• Mobile app subscription
• Additional currency for mobile app to manage market board listings
• Optional item store

The retainer service is arguably pay-to-win because you get additional storage space and market board listings due to how limited these systems are. Both are entirely limited systems that should probably be rebuilt from the ground up so you can just have a bank space and you make market board listings yourself rather than via hired assistants.