New Square Enix President Making Big ChangesFollow

I'm sure they recouped a sizable portion of development costs with the sales of the original release and collectors edition. In fact, with some googling I can see that in the first week alone they sold 630,000 copies. This equals 31.5 million dollars assuming the game was $50 and no collectors editions were purchased. I'm assuming they made at least $40-$50 million off the base sales of this game, easily enough to recoup original costs. Even if it was a failure in the eyes of the MMORPG market, they most likely broke about even and all of this 2.0 stuff is like making a new game. Yeah, they probably lost some on sever upkeep and crap like that but I doubt it is this huge money pit people seem to think it is.

They shipped 630K units, they never sold more than 200k :) Now now i know wint or somebody will say "Do you have actual paper work of SE finances blablabla" Considering the very first month there where 50K or less players playing gives an indication (That we actually know about) and after that SE disabled the option to actually know how many players where playing online. Did they made some money out of box sales ? Sure! Enough to come close to even ? Not even Close! So it is a money pit they have been throwing money at.

Well that depends on what the actual development cost was for XIV 1.0 and what the actual cost for XIV ARR is, at best guesses, XIV 1.0 would have costed them around 50 million, and that is one cheap MMO ( I personally would think SE would have spent more, but 50 is a nice number) now you add up the cost of keeping 1.0 free and up and running for over a year, updates etc etc the cost goes up, add to that cost the cost of creating a new engine just for ARR, and then the cost of the entire game being developed in a RUSH MODE! My guess would be close to 100 Mil if not a bit more adding both 1.0 and ARR together (See i added them together i am being nice) so 200K boxes sold (On a good day) does cover some, but not really even close.

There's a distinct possibility that FFXIV will fail to meet the threshold that is needed to sustain the game. It's not just a matter of getting the game done and shoving it out the door. It costs millions of dollars each year in salary payments alone to run an MMO. They have to achieve a certain number of subscribers just to be able to pay for expansions and updates to the game. If they don't hit that mark, then a vicious cycle begins where players quit because there isn't enough content, because there isn't enough money to create new content, because players are quitting, etc.

Now, they should be able to hit that mark pretty easily in the short term even if the game is only "okay." But an MMO is a long-term endeavor, and they get shut down before they lose money, not after.

FFXI managed to get away with it through the borderline abusive timesinks it employed--it kept players playing even with a dearth of content because they had become so invested in the game and the friends they made over the years. There was next to no competition at the time of its release. But expecting the next wave of new players in FFXIV to play without continued content especially when it's targeting a gaming population that specifically won't tolerate a lack of content or excessive timesinks could be the game's fatal flaw.

The only encouraging thing to me is that SE seemed to be willing to lose money up front on the game in the interest of building something that would eventually be valued by players. Given the potential lifespan of this generation's MMOs, they can afford to lose money for a few years if they can build a game that begs to be played for a decade after. As unlikely as that is, it might at least mean that they would continue to run the game at a loss in the hopes of a bigger payoff in the end. But whether or not the new president is on board with that idea is a legitimate question.

They aren't making another WoW; they're simply incorporating elements from WoW that made it successful in an attempt to broach a larger audience for FFXIV and I'm perfectly fine with that. In fact, it's impossible for them to make a direct WoW clone because of the fact that the story and lore in FFXI (and I imagine in FFXIV) are interesting, engaging, and drive you to want to finish the story.

WoW's story consists of whatever's rumbling around in the mind of Chris Metzen when he's utterly smashed. Or at least, that's what I gather because story is the absolute worst thing about WoW and over the years it's sad at how much "worse" it gets as they try to construct a better story.

So even if I level via quests, and had a talent tree system (which we really don't as FFXIV's characters are pretty much all Blue Mages), had voice acting, had a LFG system, and had raids I'd still play FFXIV beause I know that even if the storyline isn't as great as some in FFXI (which remains to be seen if it's worse but I doubt it) it's still miles above anything Blizzard's team has come out with to this day.

I agree that the storyline in 1.0 left a lot to be desired. I had very little interest in the NPCs. Even my companion NPC was uninteresting (and a bit of an *******.)

My hope is that the post-apocalyptic mood in ARR will improve things considerably.

I agree about the main storyline. And I hated my companion... I just wanted to leave him behind.

However, the "End of an Era" storyline that started once Yoshi-P took over was flat-out awesome... and not just in the nature of the storyline, but also with the battles implemented throughout the story.

If ARR's storyline is of the same tone as the End of an Era story, then I will be an extremely happy camper.

FFXIV had two different storylines. The bare bones one the originalteam came up with was very hard to follow because it was spaced out and dull. The seventh umbral era storyline was actually pretty well designed and the final boss was drop dead awesome. (And even had some hints about the End of an Era trailer that was to be released.)

SpoilerNael Van Darnus's "2HR" was MegaFlare and he only had it in his form after he absorbed the meteor's power.

VGcharts is hardly accurate and usually represents shipped units. If 660k until actually sold, that would of meant server populations of approx 35,000 players/ server at launch (unless a whole whack of people bought the game and never played.) If there was close to 30,000 people per server near launch I'd be damned surprised considering the search often only revealed 3,000-4,000 online at once until they disabled the feature.

I donno, maybe you picked the wrong race for your companion. I did miqote and I miss her. She was... interesting.

What most people don't get around their head is concurrent users and total users are widely different. Take League of Legend, currently the most played online game in the world.



32 Million accounts, 12 million play daily and yet peak is only over 5 million. Peak is only 1/6 of the total accounts, less than half of the boasted daily players. I don't claim nor dispute that there were 600k or only 100k copies sold, but most of the people statement here regarding current online game population equal copies sold is just, so far off.

Edited, Apr 4th 2013 12:12am by Khornette

I love me some beans and cornbread.