With SE dumping IP's

[Eraden]

If Sony did buy, I can see Playstation being the console exclusive but not the sole platform. I don't think they'd want to abandon the potential profits from the PC audience on the higher profile titles.



There's a lot of speculation that SE is selling off those less profitable IPs to make the company more attractive to Sony.

I'm a bit curious as to whether or not this will be helpful to FFXIV if Sony were to buy SE. I really don't know enough about such things as to be able to have a reasonable guess at what would happen. What's your take on this, Jojoya?

[Thaciscokidd]

As much as more money, resources, and less stress would be better. The more that I consider the current state of sony the more this is actually a bit scary. With Sony being more..... critical with Japanese titles that Nintendo has been seen as a better place for Japanese titles we might get more conservative with certain areas, which might be a win for some.

Also as western side of Sony has taken a bigger role in Sony I would worry that they might take a bit if Yoshi P's power over FFXIV as a whole.

[Jojoya]

I'm a bit curious as to whether or not this will be helpful to FFXIV if Sony were to buy SE. I really don't know enough about such things as to be able to have a reasonable guess at what would happen. What's your take on this, Jojoya?

Depends on what Sony chooses to do. Will they give the game a budget increase? There have been any number of times where YoshiP has said he wish he had access to WoW's budget so they would be free to do things they can't with their current budget.

Short of that, Sony would be smart just to leave the game alone and focus on any problems areas within SE. Mess with a successful game in the wrong way and you lose players. WoW's an excellent example of that. As much as the current players give Ion grief as Game Director, much of the decline really extends back to decision making that happened back when Tom Chilton was Game Director (and part of problem decision making was made over his head higher up in management).

That's one problem with a game's player base. They tend to set the most visible member of the development team as their target and blame them for all decision making when parts of the decision making are outside of the developer team's control.

Ghostcrawler (Gregg Street)was a good example of that when he was with WoW. He was just a Lead System Designer, very middle of the road position with a limited scope of job duties, but he loved to engage and talk with the players so he ended up the development team's mouthpiece. He then got blamed for every problem with the game even though he had nothing to do with the design decisions in most cases and Jeff Kaplan followed by Tom Chilton had been the Game Directors.

Kudos to both YoshiP and Ion for standing up to be that visible member as Game Director so their teams can work on their jobs.