Revisiting the 10 year roadmap

[Eorzean_username]

At what point does that break and what were newer players start reaching the endgame only to find out little new content releases in the now nearly five month patch cycles?

That's why you keep letting them wander off, and focus on cannibalising the next available demographic that you think is still "untapped" — seeking a constant churn of fresh eyes that will gain maximal value from what you've already invested, produced, and accumulated.

On the whole, I don't think the game could turn into a fully fledged single player game. Games like the aforementioned FFXVI benefit from being a one and done experience. It doesn't need to retain you nor is the expectation. FFXIV does. That becomes much harder if they continuously remove the multiplayer elements and down everything down to the barebones.

That's when you start cranking up the investment in cash-shop mechanics, season passes, and other psychologically-predatory mechanics, in order to gain more value from each remaining unit, and keep them "around" via reinforcement and comfort — rather than the much costlier investment of broadly-creating content (which is something of a haphazard, blindfolded, dart-board process), that will "hopefully" appeal to enough people to keep them around and "subscribed".

ie: Creating "quality content" that "satisfies" a broad selection of preexisting players is a much more risky, costly, time-consuming, and uncertain process than much-better established and optimised systems for propping up a live-service product, such as micro/macro transactions and FOMO loops.

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Sorry for the excess cynicism, but my guess is that you can expect XIV to angle more in those directions over time, because it's ultimately a corporate product, and what they want to see is Growth™, rather than a more modest steady-state of long-term, dedicated players that are "happy", but also aren't really expanding or adding much YOY (especially with fixed subscription fees and expansion cadence).

Yoshida will play along with this because a) corporate obligations and b) as he's said before, doing this (eg, cash-shop stuff, etc) is necessary to allow him/the team to "do what they want to do" with XIV beyond what a mere subscription fee can allow them (which, actually, is also the justification that's been given for the sub fee vs. F2P / B2P).