Do you think cost is an acceptable excuse regarding not getting FFXIV content?

[Milea]

Truly a strange thing when considering this is not free-to-play. Sure they are very generous for new players allowing them to play through multiple expansions for free but this doesn't concern new content where the excuse is thrown at. That is for people actively paying to play.
In addition to this most people who haven't un-subbed are very dedicated and likely the people dropping $42 on a glamour or $30 for a cash shop mount. Yet that is not enough to prioritize making sure the company is budgeting right to give FFXIV ample maintenance?

You may feel like this dedicated fans are just granted and will always throw huge money at any new thing, but I have a suspicion that is not true.

[Volgia]

Truly a strange thing when considering this is not free-to-play. Sure they are very generous for new players allowing them to play through multiple expansions for free but this doesn't concern new content where the excuse is thrown at. That is for people actively paying to play.
In addition to this most people who haven't un-subbed are very dedicated and likely the people dropping $42 on a glamour or $30 for a cash shop mount. Yet that is not enough to prioritize making sure the company is budgeting right to give FFXIV ample maintenance?

You may feel like this dedicated fans are just granted and will always throw huge money at any new thing, but I have a suspicion that is not true.

Is this regarding the not having a normal mode for Forked Tower?

[Exmo]

Do you think cost is an acceptable excuse regarding not getting FFXIV content?

Of course it is. You can wish for the moon and the stars but at the end of the day you have to be reasonable about what can actually be achieved given current resources.

[Kaurhz]

Cost I don't think is a valid excuse, given how long this game has been running.

There are valid excuses, given the age of the codebase and everything else., e.g., especially when it may come to the ease of integrating new QoL systems.

But as far as content itself goes... Cost I don't really think is valid.

I think contrary to everything, their biggest issue is creativity and and scope of content... Back in the day you would have content which appealed to niche groups, e.g., crafting at the end-game, gathering, and other content like the OG Diadem... - But as time has gone by they have tried to widen the scope to players that aren't really interested in said content... Another way of putting it is that they have prioritized participation rates over substance of content, and in many cases the former comes at a detriment to the latter.. Especially when you look at abandoned systems like Grand Companies... Or those that they have outright removed, e.g., concealed nodes over actually reworking them.

The way I look at it personally is that this game has done a far better job in the past when the budget was most likely far smaller than what it is now.

So I don't really think it's a cost or budget issue as much as it is a creative bankruptcy and direction issue.

[Gwenkatsu]

No matter the reasoning, it was a stupid decision.
They release a very casual zone where you level specific jobs that are only for use within the raid; and then they release no casual version of said raid.
It's comical.

[hunter2]

It's an awful excuse. SE has chronically underinvested in this game which is why the patches take so long and deliver so little. They could have solved their staffing issues 5+ years ago if they wanted to, or at least during Endwalker when the game was raking in buckets of cash. Understand that the gradual decline that FFXIV is experiencing is a choice, not an inevitability.

[Milea]

It's an awful excuse. SE has chronically underinvested in this game which is why the patches take so long and deliver so little. They could have solved their staffing issues 5+ years ago if they wanted to, or at least during Endwalker when the game was raking in buckets of cash. Understand that the gradual decline that FFXIV is experiencing is a choice, not an inevitability.

Have they ever gone into why they chose this route? You would think when the game gets praise, wins awards and player numbers go up they would give more resources not less.

[hunter2]

Have they ever gone into why they chose this route? You would think when the game gets praise, wins awards and player numbers go up they would give more resources not less.

I don't think they've ever directly said so (that would be a PR disaster) but the idea is to have diverse revenue streams so that the company is still healthy even if one revenue stream suffers. A lot of SE games have flopped though, so in hindsight that money would have been much better spent ensuring that XIV is a reliable financial backbone of the company.

[Jeeqbit]

You didn't specify what sort of cost. Financial cost? Time cost? Productivity cost?

In terms of financial cost, not really, because SE clearly has billions of yen.

In terms of time cost, which is the specifically what led to the Forked Tower issue, yes, because you can't necessarily employ someone, train them and assign them a task if there is not enough time to do so.

That said, they should have predicted the issue and accounted for it earlier than they did. Unfortunately, they had only decided to make a Field Operation right before the expansion release due to Zepla's video, so they didn't actually have as much time to plan it as they did all their other content.

[0blivion]

What happened is that SE changed business strategies a couple times and fucked up big time, leading to big losses. So they curb them by not reinvesting into XIV. If you want details on it, I recommend reading the last few shareholder meeting summaries.