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

[BabyYoda]

If throwing money at developing the game isn't a solution then why throwing money to ads is?

It is like the game doesn't like veteran and try to get new generation of players that has way less likely to follow +1000 hour story

[GinzoKazama]

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...

Short answer is that XIVs profits are subsidizing other games and if I am not mistaken quite a few of their other ventures have not done well as they had wanted, such as FF16. There's a longer answer I am sure, but that its in a nutshell. They're using XIV to prop up other poor investments.

[Hyperia]

If this was an aircraft, they are ignoring their instruments (all of us warning them) as they have been calling out stall warning, sink rate, artificial horizon (8 ball) pointing down.

They are looking through the windows at night and in the clouds, not paying attention to how bad things are getting.

The hard deck is approaching fast…

[Rueby]

If this was an aircraft, they are ignoring their instruments (all of us warning them) as they have been calling out stall warning, sink rate, artificial horizon (8 ball) pointing down.

They are looking through the windows at night and in the clouds, not paying attention to how bad things are getting.

The hard deck is approaching fast…

WOOP WOOP Terrain Terrain Pull Up Pull Up WOOP WOOP...

[Swordsman]

Shoot, I'd take the aircraft analogy even further and say that SE accidentally entered a spin and is having trouble applying any of the proper spin recovery techniques. They only have so much time to figure it out before it's too late.

[JimCasey_RF6]

Shoot, I'd take the aircraft analogy even further and say that SE accidentally entered a spin and is having trouble applying any of the proper spin recovery techniques. They only have so much time to figure it out before it's too late.

Judging from the numerous episodes of air crash investigation I've seen, it's already far too late for the devs to avoid a catastrophe if the situation is so bad that their aircraft has already entered a spin. I don't personally think the situation is quite that dire, yet, but I agree with what someone else mentioned about them ignoring their instruments. I'm sure a lot of other players are losing trust in our pilots, too.

[Derio]

My thing is. If FFXIV is their most profitable product. Why isnt the MSQ fully voiced along with key side storylines?

[ForteNightshade]

Because the game is comfortably in a spot where it continues to print money without needing substantial updates. Put bluntly, there's zero incentive from a business prospect to invest significant resources into a project that's more or less self sufficient with the bread crumbs on often.

Think of it like this. They could invest an additional 20-30M into FFXIV but would that bring in a wealth of new players? Probably not. On the flipside, putting that money towards another game could very easily pay it back and then some. Unfortunately, SE's attempts at new IPs or anything not Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest related have been woefully inept. But that isn't a flaw on the concept itself just their poor decision making.

[Hyperia]

Because the game is comfortably in a spot where it continues to print money without needing substantial updates. Put bluntly, there's zero incentive from a business prospect to invest significant resources into a project that's more or less self sufficient with the bread crumbs on often.

Think of it like this. They could invest an additional 20-30M into FFXIV but would that bring in a wealth of new players? Probably not. On the flipside, putting that money towards another game could very easily pay it back and then some. Unfortunately, SE's attempts at new IPs or anything not Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest related have been woefully inept. But that isn't a flaw on the concept itself just their poor decision making.

Sometimes I wonder why developers such as SE don’t do things like a kickstarter by having fans buy games early at a reduced price. If milestones are hit, the game goes forward and more is added if they hit more milestones.

If they don’t hit enough, a refund is given and they try again. This way, games that we want get made and they know their production budget from what they earned. If they fail to reach milestones, concessions have to be made. Upon release, any sales after is their profit.

[Vyrerus]

Part of the issue is that FFXIV is an MMO, and its success and development slice is partially forecasted from their first MMO.

I don't remember the exact year, but sometime during or around Shadowbringers, FFXIV finally overtook FFXI as their top earning product. This means that it took FFXIV around 10 years to earn enough to out earn FFXI, and by that point FFXI had dwindled to a few thousand stalwart fans and their many multi-boxed accounts (and all of the RMT bots of course).

Then you remember that FFXIV was also once a failed project, and that it took most of XI's earnings in order to bankroll it TWICE!

This set a bad precedent for SE, because what it taught them was than an MMO could be insanely profitable and bankroll other projects without a lot of investment. FFXI's always been given content in the form of stories but also in the form of insanely long grind processes for relic weapons and their analogues. Like XIV relics but on steroids, XI's relics take months to years to make for the average player, even now.

I've said it once and I'll say it again, the suits at SE don't understand that XIV is an entirely different beast, and they expect it to print money relative to its scale for as long as XI did. XIV is basically a big ladder that they add new rungs to every few months. FFXI was essentially a plateaued maze with multiple goals that they added onto every few years. it takes a rather long time to get anywhere or advance in XI. For XIV it's one linear journey up the ladder that only lasts that one trip, and then you're at the top with everyone else waiting on new rungs.

So XIV's model requires new content more often as well as new players more often in order to last, because it is not designed to last. But the suits think it will.

And it's extra funny because the game's credits have started to credit literally anyone that's even on the periphery of involvement as well as slowing down the crawl year after year to make it seem like they haven't lost most of their actual development staff. They also continue to list people who worked on older sections of the game that haven't touched a XIV dev kit in years.

It's all so tiresome. Classic Square though. Amazing how Enix even carried that aspect of Square forward.