I think ARR will succeed.Follow

Yep. It's just a matter of finding that sweet-spot that keeps Final Fantasy fans happy while keeping the player base large enough to generate a decent profit sooner rather than far later.

Again. I'm not concerned about the future of this game in terms of longevity.

As Hyrist said, the F2P model from "failed" games is usually at the demands of the investors and the shareholders. SE doesn't have to worry about either of them. They can play a long game here.

I wonder if it's also cultural. How popular are F2P games in Japan in general?

If it's "SE" saying it, you can rest assured that it's Wada saying it, and you can rest assured that Wada will do whatever it takes to generate a profit. Consumer PR 101: better to promise now and to apologize later.

I'm just saying, it wouldn't be the first time.

It's cute that you think there's such a big difference. The only difference that matters in the least is that this game is titled Final Fantasy XIV instead of Fantasy Earth Zero.

You've never taken any business classes, I see. There are gigantic differences in legal and financial liability as well as investments.

But at least you're right about the name. The impact of a Final Fantasy on Square Enix as a brand is not to be underestimated. That alone causes major differences, which would encourage SE not to let a flagship title go free to play.

So is the rampant hatred and bashing.

Unfortunately it's not just a waiting game. Running an MMO has a certain expense threshold that requires a minimum number of subscribers to be profitable. One of the main reasons F2P games manage to be profitable is by significantly reducing those expenses, lowering the expense threshold considerably. They gain more players and generally need a smaller, less qualified staff.



There are differences, but they aren't pertinent to my point.

The point of bringing up Fantasy Earth Zero is that SE has shown that they have a first-hand understanding of how abandoning an MMO can be more profitable than sticking it out. And it worked. The game was much more successful as a result of abandoning the subscription model. If you don't think Wada's gears are turning with consideration for that, you're the one who doesn't understand how business works. At a certain point, Wada isn't going to care about the brand name. He's going to spin it into an explanation for why F2P is the best thing for the fans, it's not a failure but a "modern" business model that they should have considered earlier, it doesn't reflect poorly of the game, etc.

If the game doesn't succeed this time, they'd be insane to let them keep sinking money into it.

Actually, it's not uncommon at all for companies to take a loss on their flagship service, as long as the company on the whole remains profitable. Sometimes, the brand is more important than the profit from that brand. The brand helps to sell the other products, resulting in profit.

Hence why FFXIV will likely never go F2P.

I suppose you could be right about that. Not that it will make the game a success by any measure, but it is a potential path to maintaining the game on a subscription model. Still, it requires only a certain amount of calculated loss. They'll probably still need 100k subs at minimum, which should be doable.

And even then, it would be a surprise to all of ten people if they went back on their word and switched to a more profitable F2P model.

You also see a lot of modern MMOs going from sub to f2p because they overreached (hi, SWTOR). Many of them really did think they were going to be the next WoW and have millions of subscribers, in which case the subscription model makes perfect sense. Then reality happened and they "bottomed out" around 700k to 1m people and couldn't sustain their game at that level.

Not because that level is unsustainable, but because they overreached to begin with.

I don't see FFXIV having that problem for a couple of reasons:
1: FFXI topped out at about 500k people and SE was perfectly happy with that. Getting to that level again shouldn't be terribly difficult. It's an entirely realistic number.
2: FFXIV 1.0 bombed so colossally that the current plan cannot possibly include numbers above 500k. In fact I'd think they'd be able to run the game at 250-300k and be perfectly fine. Maybe even lower than that.

The trend of new MMOs reaching for WoW's impossible subscriber base is fading away now. New MMOs are coming out to support a niche in the audience. Which is exactly the right thing to do here.

Free-to-play also doesn't have to be abusive. GW2 does this pretty well actually. All the paid items are available in-game (albeit rare), and none of them contribute in any significant way to player power.

SWTOR is a good example of a game that did f2p badly. Hilariously badly.

I am not denying anything. I'm saying it's not likely to go F2P. There's a big difference between "never" and "not likely."

If you honestly think it's likely to go F2P, then I don't think you understand exactly how much the Final Fantasy brand means to Square Enix. Yoshi-P hasn't ruled out F2P (no good businessman ever rules anything out), but he's also made it perfectly clear that this game is not at all designed for a F2P model.

But I guess if being realistic is white knighting in this day in age, then you can call me Sir Lancelot.

Square has spent a vast amount of money on this game, the only honest way they can recoupe that money is with free to play. Games make a ton more money as free to play than they do as pay to play, this is well proven fact. The only reason they launch as pay to play is to make the surge of money at the start from box sales. The more money a game spends on development the less chance they will make it back under pay to play in a saturated market, this game will simply not be able to keep FFXI type player numbers past the first month. Given that they need free to play not only to make more money but also to stop the game becoming unplayable due to low numbers.

Even Japan is releasing games like phantasy star online 2 under free to play so this isn't something they are against.

Also I've played a lot of MMOs and when you see something like this:



Translation: free to play after 6-12 months.

It's not if, it's when. Even if you totally dismiss that they can't make money from pay to play long term the player loss after the first month will be embarassing and make the game almost unplayable. The only way you can explain a company spending this amount of money on a rebuild is by going free to play. Heck it doens't even have what SWTOR has in that it's the only SW based MMO out there, this game also has to compete for FF fans with FFXI, a game that honestly has shoes too big for this game to ever fill.

Bumping this topic in 6 months after release just to show how dumb some people are being.



Edited, Mar 16th 2013 6:20am by preludes

Edited, Mar 16th 2013 6:21am by preludes