Quote Originally Posted by Onisake View Post
Anyone else get seriously irked whenever they see someone say 'They are just making it a grind fest to keep people here and make us keep playing. all they want is our money.' you're still here. you clearly don't care. why bring it up? go do something else if you hate the grind. plenty of free games out there. go play league of legends. go play D3 or starcraft. Go play skyrim. go play vindictus, CoH, or any number of OTHER Games while you wait for 2.0.

Square Enix is a company. they have interests. they have share-holders. profits are a big concern for them. but whenever i see someone say that i dismiss anything and everything they have to say. you don't' know how a company really works. and you especially don't' know how a japanese company works. you have clear misconceptions of business and company culture. just stop talking about it. you don't' know. you CAN'T know what SE is thinking and what their business culture is like. you don't work for them. just let them do their thing. you dont' have to keep playing. you dont' like it walk the **** away.

now honestly. and i mean really use your brain here. How much money do you think SE made off of launch of FFXIV? if you think it was in the black, think again. their next mmo was anounced back in what? 2005? 6 years of development made up in launch? not likely. they were counting on making profit through subscriptions in the long run. now keep in mind there was an extended free period. Now, how much money do you think they've sank into keeping this game alive? How much easier would it have been to cut losses and kill the project before yoshi took over?

To put it into perspective. assuming a $15USD monthly subscription:

a software developer in Japan makes roughly 70k USD a year. that's ~5.8k a month. that means it takes almost 390 subscribers to pay for one developer.

now back in october if you looked at server loads you might see 40k people on during peak times. meaning you might have a total subscription base of 100k. i haven't looked at server log-ins recently. but i'm assuming its lower. let's say half of them stayed on board. 50k total subscribers. which means maybe 9 million over the course of a year. that's enough to support maybe 100 people + overhead if there's an average salary of 70k for all employees on this project. Square-Enix japan reports to have 3.2k employees as a comparison. I doubt they are making money. They might be breaking even on current costs. It's almost guaranteed they are not in the black on this. Keep in mind they need to support the development team, the live team, testers, Quality, servers, marketing, logistics, etc. etc.

So tell me again why they are so concerned about keeping a game alive that clearly costs them a ton of money and might break even a couple of years after 2.0 launch? because any logical businessman would have cut losses and pursued more lucrative projects long ago. hell, bare minimum shut the servers down. re purpose the current live team and just wait for 2.0 launch.

know what i think? I think it's because SE truly loves what they do. they take pride in it. they love their fans. they love their games and they want to make them the best they can be. they want us to enjoy it too. even if it means taking a loss. If i have to, heaven forbid, grind a little while because its the easiest thing to implement while they clean up problems, make better content, and make the game better than ever so i can really enjoy it. guess what? i'm not going to complain. because honestly FFXI was the same way. and i loved that game

END F***ING RANT
We have a WK here.
Your math makes totally sense, since FF XIV is their ONLY game. Wait a minute, its not!
They are definetely not making money out of XIV, but i can assure you they are not starving or firing people.

They're not changing the actual content. We'll keep getting the same thing until 2.0
All we can do is hope that they take our feedback and use it to improve 2.0