Subscription should be to improve FF, not just make other games.

[Rinoa_353]

I agree, they should give the FFXIV dev team at least 30 percent more budget so they can hire more devs, they really need it. SE needs to stop creating junk no one wants as the majority of them fail.

[Fatch38]

I agree, they should give the FFXIV dev team at least 30 percent more budget so they can hire more devs, they really need it. SE needs to stop creating junk no one wants as the majority of them fail.

just FYI, CBU already has around 300 devs (and devs not writers etc) while whole SE is around 5000. it's not about manpower/money, it's only a matter of talent and good leader here. Yoshida is clearly the most overrated director in the video game industry, ppl always praise him for ARR but they never look at all the bad decisions in the last 10 years.

falcolm as a whole is something around 60 devs and yet they release games every years (not AAA but AA games with some really fresh idea and good gameplay, substance over fluff/visual).

heard of clair obscure ? 30 devs from france and 8 from korea to make a (really good) game.

we can bring many more example. you could double the devs of CBU3 and you will totally see the same sh*t over and over.

[Rinoa_353]

just FYI, CBU already has around 300 devs (and devs not writers etc) while whole SE is around 5000. it's not about manpower/money, it's only a matter of talent and good leader here. Yoshida is clearly the most overrated director in the video game industry, ppl always praise him for ARR but they never look at all the bad decisions in the last 10 years.

falcolm as a whole is something around 60 devs and yet they release games every years (not AAA but AA games with some really fresh idea and good gameplay, substance over fluff/visual).

heard of clair obscure ? 30 devs from france and 8 from korea to make a (really good) game.

we can bring many more example. you could double the devs of CBU3 and you will totally see the same sh*t over and over.

Having a larger dev team would allow them to work on more things at once and also have the workforce to finally rid the game of the spaghetti code and modernize it to have the features of the mobile version.

[hunter2]

I guarantee you that if they doubled the salary they offer, they would have no hiring issues; at the end of the day it's all about finances.

The simple reality is that Square Enix does not re-invest XIV profits in XIV. Their strategy is not to improve and grow the game - their strategy is to ride the game's popularity for as long as possible and milk you for subscription money while letting it slowly die.

[Kozh]

Cost meant "development cost", not "financial cost". Which is another way of saying Yoshi-P didn't put it in the development roadmap and that it was a management/decision issue. Obviously SE has plenty of funds, they are even hiring.

Not disagreeing with you, but in this case wouldn't it be more appropriate to call it mismanage?

Still, personally I think it's both when it comes to SE. FF14 isn't the first and only game that's treated like cash cow. It's probably just more noticeable since it's an ongoing game that's been running for 10 years. SE is notorious for pulling resources and devs from one project to help with the other more urgent project, or to assign multiple project to a director/team.
I suspect CBU3 was exempted from this at the beginning, and their first multi projects is ff16 (which was developed for a long time). Now they probably assign cbu3 more projects (FFT remake and potentially FF9 remake), which obviously impact ff14 as well.

[Jeeqbit]

Not disagreeing with you, but in this case wouldn't it be more appropriate to call it mismanage?

I'm not sure why it gets explained this way, but it usually does lately. It's a bit like using a scientific term to say something simple. Saying it was due to "development cost" seems to be business lingo for "I didn't make the right decisions".

[BedtimeBear]

I sub once or twice a year and even then when I get gifted money.


Respect your time.


As we've seen with the direction of combat, the recent LL and general quest design, it's unlikely there's going to be a shake up. Move on like many players do. It's more fun to play catch up pre-expansion.

[NaoSen]

When FF14 Mobile comes out with things such as Chocobo unlock at MSQ level 5, Teleport direct to Aetheryte shards, a better gpose system, a better glam system, a friends system that actually functions well, in game voice chat and a better netcode making it feel more responsive it's pretty hard to justify the Buy to play + Sub + Store model of the console/pc version.
Yes ones brand new and ones on a spaghetti code foundation however that excuse can only go so far, at some point you have to just suck it up and take from that huge income stream and fix the game you have a 10 year plan for.

Edit:

The reason why SE can't find developers is that their process involves crazy code debt and bad legacy systems - no fresh blood will deal with this.

CCP Games had a similar situation with Eve Online, the developers who worked on an entire system had since moved on and its code wasn't in English either so no-one could even understand it as fresh blood were mostly english speakers, they eventually re-wrote an entirely new system to replace it with new features etc... At the time of re-write their average online player base was 35 000 players.
It can be done, you just have to care enough about your product to invest in its future, they could bring in new talent to work on replacing old with new to build a new foundation for the future. It's a lot easier to just have to understand how you need to plug your new system in than modify an old.

[Kohashi]

Subscription should be to improve FF, not just make other games.

They are not mutually exclusive.

It's good that FF14 carries SE hard, but it's annoying when most of their projects end up in failure and very little is given back to the game that is carrying their company, not to go bankrupt.

But the time is ticking for SE. Companies that are incapable of evolving and adapting to trends in an ever-changing market will always fade into oblivion in the end. SE has been struggling for a long time now. The fact that they changed CEOs + underwent a major restructuring is a further confirmation that they are waking up. Is it done in time? Only time will tell.

[Carin-Eri]

They are not mutually exclusive.

It's good that FF14 carries SE hard, but it's annoying when most of their projects end up in failure and very little is given back to the game that is carrying their company, not to go bankrupt.

But the time is ticking for SE. Companies that are incapable of evolving and adapting to trends in an ever-changing market will always fade into oblivion in the end. SE has been struggling for a long time now. The fact that they changed CEOs + underwent a major restructuring is a further confirmation that they are waking up. Is it done in time? Only time will tell.

Sad but true.

I used to play Star Trek online. A few years ago the companies which managed STO, Perfect World Entertainment (publisher) and Cryptic Studios (Developer) filtered a large amount of money, and quite a few of STO's Devs, to a new game they wanted to develop - Magic: Legends (based on Magic the Gathering).

They pulled the plug on it near the end of the development stages - the game had a soft beta and microtransaction store but that was as far as it got. The only reason they gave was that "their vision for the game missed the mark".

So they had to refund anyone who purchased anything from the microtransaction store. The Devs that moved across from STO were essentially made redundant - they were unable to return to STO for reasons that were never made clear, and both PWE and Cryptic struggled on, with far fewer Devs, for about two years when both were sold to Embracer group/Gearbox Entertainment. And they inherited the numerous bugs and glitches that the previous studios never addressed. I gather, from friends who still play it, those bugs etc remain to this day.

I mean, granted, their business model was/is very much F2P (with a VERY heavy emphasis on loot boxes and expensive item bundles) but it does show that smaller companies don't recover from diverting their funds into questionable projects.

SE really shouldn't take FFXIV for granted the way it seems to.