20th Anniversary Reddit AMA

I tried to donate sperm but no one wants it... I got so many order of protections now and I had to move my cardboard box away from the local school (the internet was so fast...)

"4Gamer: Last but not least, what will happen to "FINAL FANTASY XI" in the future? And please give a word to the player."

"Matsui: Right now, I'm devoting myself to creating something that I haven't been able to deliver yet in the 20th anniversary project. If you don't do it properly, I don't think there will be any future. I'm not at the stage where I can talk concretely, but I have a plan for the future."

https://www.4gamer.net/games/005/G000546/20220513055/

Didn't they make a Dragon Quest Online - Offline already?

He didn't really create anything for the 20th anniversary, so that could be a new cheeseburger recipe that someone was so interested about at this point.

They have been making the VR missions, whatever new endgame content for AF3 upgrades come from and the relic weapon stuff.

This thing he is talking of could end up being nothing, but given he obviously wants this game to carry on I would guess he is trying to create some kind of dev system that bypasses the ps2 devkit. He was originally a programmer afterall, and his son is too.

Coming into this anniversary was weird as ***

They made a stream to pat themselves on the back and gave us nothing we already knew or expected. What was worst was no previews of the gear. To me waiting 3 years on goodwill that something was coming and not show anything concrete on the date was alarming right from the jump.

I was totally prepared for nothing more but empy and weapons, but boy. To not show 1 weapon and 1 piece of gear, blew my mind how weak this 20 year anniversary was if they couldn't trust their product to sell itself. Gotta keep milking us it seems with hope.

If they weren’t going to give us anything they could have atleast kept all campaigns active the entire month instead of that one week.

Nobody was happy with the 20th Stream, sometimes I don't even know why they have community managers if they didn't see this PR disaster coming.

At this point though, it is what it is and you just have to accept it for what it is. We still like the game, and there is new stuff coming, even if it's kind of meager.

We can piss and moan but we still like and care about the game, because if we didn't we wouldn't keep coming back.

It's not a "PR disaster" for anyone that had realistic expectations

I went into it expecting nothing, but it went on for so long it just instilled the feeling in you that there was no way they would go on for this long unless there was something at the end.

It should of been shorter, and the CM should of said right up front there would be no content announcements when they saw people were hyping it up.

We just keep going in a cycle in this thread... repeating the same ***. The smug ex/jaded players all saying "I told you so" in repeat. Everyone else disappointed at the lack of literally anything substantial that we didn't already know. Can anything new come from this thread or we just gonna repeat the last 20 pages over and over.

I am happy about the inevitable XI/XIV sub merge. I hope it means Playonline finally dies as well.

Decoupling POL would require them to rework the entire codebase of the game. It's not gonna happen just because they bundle the subs.

Well this is the hopium thread so let me hold on to the idea

What is this supposed to be showing off from this 2015 video @ 40 mins

Scrapped concept art for tartarus and what they wanted to do with hades.

We did sister. and were utterly blown away by how bad it was.



Don't go off saying how proud you are about reaching 20years and not having a preview for the *** 3 years you had us dicking around begging for scraps.

20 year old PS2 game

Poorly managing the ballooning expectations over several years could be considered a PR disaster. If that was largely unique to the non-Japanese communities, ignoring a large part of their player base could also be considered a PR disaster. I highly doubt the game would survive if they lost a healthy chunk of NA, EU, etc. subscriptions, especially since the percentage of multi-boxers is probably much higher outside of Japan, yet little if anything is done to acknowledge that we also make the game possible.

Rather than making vague hype comments that could be easily misconstrued, they should've specifically stated what content they were going to make that caused monthly patches to be light during that timeframe, even if it had to come with the disclaimer that the schedule may need to be adjusted.

I personally wasn't expecting anything specific and I was still disappointed. In the end, all we got out of that long wait was a livestream with a brief mention of planned future content (sans preview) and the TVR missions released so far. What exactly did they spend the 3 years doing?

Voracious Resurgence

Something I think FF14 players need to keep in mind, cause there are quite a few FF14 players here. Is that FF11 is not its own entity anymore, FF11 was merged with FF14 operations and is counted towards FF14 now on all financial reports. This is part of the reason FF14 became the most profitable game a couple of years ago and overtook FF11 (even though it has extremely high dev costs compared to 11), because they stopped counting FF11 profits in 2013 and merged them with FF14. You can literally see this on every financial report and every PR statement, FFXI no longer exists as its own entity from 2013 when Tanaka "gave" FF11 to Yoshida (see recent interview). Dragonq10 however, which is much smaller and JP only is always listed as it's own entity.

All the revenue FF11 makes is counted towards FF14, all the player numbers from FF11 are counted towards FF14, if you play 11 and 14 you're counted twice in any financial reports / official announcement. FF14 averages around 200-300k subs in normal times (not expansion months) and so adding 30-50k to that is a nice addition and matters to them (or they wouldn't do it).

If Square shut down FF11 or it ceased to work for some reason, FF14 operations would lose 50k+ players overnight and lose 5-10+ million in revenue, this is obviously not something they want to happen. The same server engineers work on both games, the same GM staff, the same CManagers, the same crysta payment system, the same square enix account system, the same texture artists and so all the revenue 11 brings in goes to their operations.

As much as we may not like FF14, this is a fact now. They have stated this in interviews and they show it on financial reports. We are one and the same entity from a financial and management standpoint. It's effectively wow and wow classic, in that one is modern and aimed at mainly casual players and the other oldschool and aimed at more mainly hardcore players. The main difference is that unlike wow classic, XI is a totally different game from XIV and so needs unique content paid for from the sub instead of archive backups.

Ultimately this relationship benefits both games in numerous ways, and I think spending a little more in the very least to future proof the devkit is worth it. If you currently play both games, ff14 operations effectively double dip you and they would be dumb to not want that to continue. Not only does it benefit them financially, but it allows them retain hardcore players who may otherwise move to a totally different game like Lost Ark, ESO, GW2 or WoW.

After all this time, I also don't think they have virtualized the servers yet and are renewing server hosting contracts separately from XIV (at least from what Matsui said) , so i do wonder if and when they decided to upgrade the hardware if they will be a bit more profitable and some lag issues might be resolved.

Here's their comments about Info systems of this game in the 4 Gamer interview, probably their most candid to date since I keep going back to it to pull stuff out

Please note this is machine translation
https://www.4gamer.net/games/005/G000546/20220511037/

While some of it is right you missed out key details.

FFXI and FFXIV got merged under Creative Business Unit 3 which was made as their division for FFXI, FFXIV and DQ Builders.

Still not much effort in your post, I expect more slander next time, got a slight chuckle but no belly laughs.

These numbers are astronomically wrong. 14 is booming in subs right now, we can't even buy Endwalker on Playstation Store. The scandals of Activision Blizzard has caused WoW players to abandon the game and cross over to 14. Last year (2021) FF14 hit over 2 million daily players. 2 million. Then in December after Endwalker came out, 3 million daily players. The numbers have dipped back down a little bit this year, but they are still in the millions. Not 200-300k.

Of course they don't care about FF11 numbers. Even if we were to believe it has 50k active subs, it's not even 1% of 14's profits. Losing 50k players out of 2 million is nothing to them. We get it, you are trying to make 11 seem more important than it actually is. It would be a sad day if 11 shut down, but it wouldn't affect SE nearly as much as you wish.

Basic FF14 sub numbers
Basic FF11 sub numbers

Someone went and cranked the copium valve holy ***.

https://mmo-population.com/about/

It's literally just a bad guess using reddit subscribers as a barometer for subs. They say as much on their own page. Stop linking this garbage, it's worse than Radial's numbers.

If they really had millions of subs, they'd publish a subscriber count every so often. Instead, they mention daily logins during free login periods shortly after an expansion. Every company wants to advertise that they have more subs than they actually do, because it helps drive *even more* subs.

SE has shown tremendous inability to manage their hardware on both XI and XIV, so being unable to buy Endwalker is not really a statement on population as much as their own ineptitude. Even if they had twice the players of WoW, a competent company wouldn't be closing a digital product over too many subs.

It's probably not true that FFXI subs are 1/5 of FFXIV's like Radial claims, but it's also not less than 1%. It's likely in the 5-10% range, especially when you consider that FFXI's sub costs potentially 3x as much as FFXIV's. Regardless, none of this means SE has a proper incentive to give FFXI new content. Reality is often disappointing.

https://www.ffxiah.com/database

I'm sure many of us know of it, but relinking for those that don't.
Tis the best metric I know of for Xi.

That's why I said "basic." But the sub numbers aren't close to each other right now. Endwalker has caused the population to boom, it's been wildly successful. All of the data centers are full, that's why they had to move up the release of their new one this summer, and another one next year.

If we were to be extremely generous and say 14 only had 1 million active subs (its not that low), 5% would be 50k. But the 11 numbers are inflated this month because of free to play. So if you want to say 2-3% to feel better, fine.

The fact remains, if everyone voted with their wallet regarding 11, and a mass exodus occurred, SE would probably send out thank you cards. It's not, by any means, propping up 14.