If FFXIV is their most profitable product, why is the game so mistreated?

[Kohashi]

Exactly.

In fact, It's actually worse than that.

Whilst can only 'talk' in terms of my own experience, it goes beyond "hard-working people hardly ever getting promoted" in this day and age. In my workplace it has become commonplace for a member of staff retiring/moving to another job/leaving for some reason being replaced by someone of a lower pay grade. For example, our Band 4 medical secretary retired recently. They were replaced with a Band 3 medical secretary who is, for all intents and purposes, doing the same job as the person they replaced but being paid rather a lot less for it.
And that's if they bother replacing the person who left at all. Because they'll often find a reason/excuse not to, and distribute the workload of the person who left amongst the remaining staff. It is utterly dishonest and lacks any demonstrative value whatsoever since it utterly destroys staff morale, but the numbers sure look good on paper and in the end, keeping the bean-counters happy is, sadly, always the highest priority.

And needless to say, the money saved from said employee leaving never finds it's way back into the bank account of the service itself.

It's a very widespread tactic to prioritize short-term gains.

You can see it in the workplace or games because ultimately companies aim for profit. They prefer to exploit momentarily gains for a short time while using people who desperately need money or fun or to evade reality (if we talk about games).

If people would stand up and not allow that to happen, the story would be vastly different but the world has no shortage of the poor, naive, and desperate.

[JimCasey_RF6]

Square Enix is not doing well right now financially. The management team cost the company a lot of money by trying to force DEI into their products. They can't afford to invest more money into FFXIV right now. Thankfully they have realized their mistake and are taking steps to correct it, but it will still take quite some time to right the ship and get things back to how they used to be.

[Maeyria]

I think it is a mixture of / three things that I can imagine to be the biggest reasons:
- a 10-years running system
- input vs output
- lack of (new) reliable/able/willing manpower

for the first (a 10-years running system):
It has been running for 10 years and they adjusted for 10 years.
For some things, they found the sweet spot/sweet process over the years and are keeping to it, which makes sense, you always have only a limited amount of recources and cannot burn all of it for trying out new things all the time.
Some resources are needed to keep the game running fluently.
I can imagine them trying to do things more efficiently over time as well, and that adjustment bears the question of: where is it still efficient and where does the quality suffer too much?
In the end, they are a company and have to think of those things and maybe, the finetuning is visible to us, as they might have put a bit too much effort to the efficiency part potentially?

for the second (input vs output):
Commonly known as 80/20 rule, but the better the game gets, the more resources are needed to make it even better and at some point you have to ask the question, if its worth the input.
To make it more simple:
If I have an overall bad game: bad story, bad writing, bad ui, bad graphics, also potentioally very simple ... I can improve the overall game huge bounds by adjusting just small portions of it.
But if the game is, let's say, above average with everything, you need to make huge changes and it still only feels like a small impact

One side of the medal is: Players got used to its high quality and complain when its unfair (i.e. forget how good the ganme is compared to other games)
The other side of the medal is: Danger of SQEX getting used to being at the top for too long and getting lazy;
And this is also a very thin line, I'd think.

the third (lack of (new) reliable/able/willing manpower):
This is just an assumption, but considering worldwide economy being in the slumps for a few years since the pandemic and many western countries lacking manpower while costs are going through the roof for the past years (and japans economy has it really rough lately, I mean, just look at how far the yen currency has fallen), I can imagine this to have a huge impact as well?

3 cents from my side

Kind regards
Maeyria

[Roda]

They got so used to success after launching Endwalker that they expected Dawntrail to be easy autopilot slam dunk of success too.

I remember watching the WoW exodus happen with dread.

Not for fear of any influx of "outsiders", but because of how likely it was for SE to mistake WoW's catastrophic pants soiling for their own success despite the game's design already groaning under the weight of its numerous problems at the time.

We are a full expansion behind the "oh crud we need to innovate" moment.

[Daralii]

I remember watching the WoW exodus happen with dread.

Not for fear of any influx of "outsiders", but because of how likely it was for SE to mistake WoW's catastrophic pants soiling for their own success despite the game's design already groaning under the weight of its numerous problems at the time.

We are a full expansion behind the "oh crud we need to innovate" moment.

The sad thing is that, according to Yoshida, 7.0 was supposed to be the start of their innovation. He said that they were throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck, but the only difference was that most of it was worse.

[ShadowyZero]

short answer: most consumers are no smarter then their cousin the ape and lack common sense or critical thought.

long answer: the company doesn't care about this project anymore an only pledge the bare minimal to keep the servers running giving crumbs to the dev team to barely get by on but rather then spending those limited resources on rebuilding and improving systems they instead have let things die an become irrelevant, and they keep re-hashing content that barely appeases the lowest common denominator an hardly justifys even paying for a monthly sub at all which needs to stop they should and desperately need to start doing new things the cycle is no longer sustainable and its not working any longer.
instead of hiring gm's or wasing money on advertising i think its time they started hiring more quality control/check, more community engagement, an push for people to complete surveys after having completed a expansion or patch so they can finally get a better idea of WHAT the players actually want an can then begin making plans around instead of waiting for the ship to sink..

[Araxes]

SE sadly invests the money from FFXIV into failing projects. The Management is trying to chase certain models that COULD potentially make a lot of money but fail to see that barely anyone is interested into those Models. They push them anyway and just expect people to like and buy it which obviously fails.

They stopped making Games for Players, they try to make moneyprinters for investors.

[Kleeya]

Each time i see someone on the forums saying that since the game has good financial results, it should be easy to get more employees working on it to get even better, i automatically assume:

- that these people did never work at all;

- that if they did work, they, without knowing it, did have a very, very sheltered job.

Since it would be way too long if i wrote about all that i did experience, i am gonna give only two examples from my last job. We were the very best shop in a retail chain of several dozens of them, with the best financial results and the best inner workings. The higher ups were taking us as a living example to say to the other shops "see ? you should do like them !", and we were even sometimes asked to send temporarily some of our employees to the underperforming shops to show them how to work correctly, even though it was not stipulated in our contracts that we should do that.

So there is quite a lot of people on these forums who must think that when we asked for more employees to get even better, we should have been granted that, right ?

Wrong, totally wrong.

The answers were :

1 : yes, like you said, you are getting great results... But you know, after sending money to the other underperforming shops to keep them afloat, there is no money for you anymore.

Which can totally relate to FF14 funding all the others SE's failed projets. But hey, that's not even the worst excuse by far. The second one was :

2 : you know, we in the higher ups are really wondering how you are doing so well... Especially when all the other shops are struggling so much... Are you sure that you don't already have way too much people instead of not enough ? So, instead of asking to have more employees, you are gonna write a detailed report of xx pages explaining what everyone is doing, so we can talk of how many people we can fire.

I am not joking about this one and i am totally 100% serious. Imagine how twisted you must be in your mind to answer someone who brings you a lot of money, and is basically preventing your whole activity to be crashing down, that if they do so well that's because they obviously have too much employees slacking on the job, and that they need to get fired.

Of course in the long run it did lead to people thinking "why do i even work so hard for ?", and beginning to do only the bare minimum needed, and the better gifted leaving for better working conditions elsewhere. Leading to the previous good financial results taking a nosedive, but hey the higher ups responsible for that did probably never notice nor understand it, too busy they were to put into their resumes "i did optimize the workforce of a dysfunctional shop, i am so very good at my job and i am such a great leader !".

Now, contrary to the 1, i am not saying that the 2 does apply to SE. I just wanted to give a practical example of how doing well and bringing great results doesn't mean that you can have more employees whenever you want. When i read people on this forum thinking the contrary, it feels like they come from a different parallel dimension than the reality i live in.

[Kaurhz]

Because they are funding other projects, which wouldn't be an issue really if XIV didn't glaringly suffer as a result, and nor would it be as big an issue if their other projects were actually successful.

and in general part of the problem is because they aren't heeding their own PR advice which is feeling that anything can be addressed in a future patch. We have long been in a state where they have thought "We can just resolve this in a future patch"

They are more concerned with maintaining the game, than they are with thinking on how they can actually improve on the service without taking significant risk.

[dies_irae]

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 think the short answer is: Because most players let them get away with it. Or at least the most vocal ones that dominate twitter and reddit where SE seems to gather most of their feedback from suggest that FF14 DT is still the bestest game evar and everyone that disagrees is just a toxic isto-phobe.

As far as i see it FF14 is running on a skeleton crew atm in terms of talent and experience which is probably also the reason they increased the patch cycle which is effectively just a price increase per patch for those that stay subbed between patches.
Just look at 7.1, you wait almost 5 months for a patch with a few hours of content (unless you are a raider). The MSQ was boooring and felt like a sidequest except for the last few minutes ...
5 months with 13€ a month would be like 65€ for THAT !?
I think in 5.x we got a 8/24 player raid series, a trial series and and exploration zone with a shorter patch cycle ...

DT managed to disconnect me so much from my character that i no longer see the need to play through the MSQ myself. Might as well just watch a streamer to see what happens.
I don't think i ever had so many instances of my characters acting in a way i completely disagree with in all of 2.0-6.5 than in DT

SE will keep milking the FF14 playerbase to fund the next projects that will "not meet expectations"

SE stock also took another hit recently so i wonder if we will see another pricey mount in the cash shop to milk those whales a bit more...

i already unsubbed both my accounts but this one just had another 6 month renewal before i did it so i can still post for a while