Honest question, and honest thought that has been rolling around in my mind. I see it so often here on the forums, and in chats, but is FFXIV really the most profitable game SE has? If that's true, why does it have so few people working on the project? Why do we have such long content and patch cycles?

I love FFXIV (flaws aside, all MMORPG's have flaws). Nothing will ever be perfect, and I both acknowledge and even concede that is the proper way that work/life balance works. I certainly don't want the dev team to melt in their respective corners from overworking... but seriously, I must ask myself as a player why this supposed cash cow is floundering under the weight of its own struggles if it's truly as strong a contender as we, the player base, hope it is...

Are we just drinking the cool-aid? Or, is it truly the cash cow, left to be over-milked and under-fed, and we should be royally rioting at the drip feed of content?

It's a fair question, because if it's not the cash cow, I can forgive so much more reguarding the patch cycle. I can forgive so much more about the job-related nurfing and gutting, and the way content seems to be rehashed with the standard trash-pack/boss formula in instanced content. I can forgive the minor gripes I had with DT's MSQ (I mostly liked it, aside from a few little things), but I could forgive those things if this game is not the cash cow...

If it truly is the cash cow though, the thing that is indeed funding other investments and other games, then we need to truly think about what that means for FFXIV as a whole when it ends up getting so little love and attention from potential development staff...

This has been rolling around in my mind for a while... and i'm not sure what to think about it...