Hiromichi Tanaka: "we're not sure" on FFXI future...Follow

Considering that ACP and MKD were supposed to be weeks worth of content, most players will finish "a year's worth of content" much quicker.

That aside, I want to comment on the part of the interview that said 14 is primarily targeted to 11 players. It feels like a sick joke that they somehow plan on making money by marketing to people they're simultaneously irritating. I know they said they'll also try to get new subscribers, but considering how many MMOs will be out for sale by 14's launch, why do they think anyone will choose theirs?

Edited, Aug 24th 2009 6:01pm by cookiesmonster

No, they won't shut down all the servers for a few more years at least, but things will still turn for the worse in the upcoming year. Regardless of new content and update, when 14 goes online, a significant portion of 11's population will be taken away for good, and we'll either have under-populated servers where finding people for an event will be much more difficult OR, more likely, they'll merge servers to trim costs and maintain healthy populations while disrupting economies and endgame LS competition. Maybe that would be okay if it was done just once, but I could see SE merging servers at least twice a year, for the next 2-3 years depending on the rate of migration to 14.

Edited, Aug 24th 2009 7:00pm by cookiesmonster

Just to address some of the claims that's been made. on-line is their most profitable division. It would follow they would do everything to have 2 thriving MMOs.


They're certainly not trying to get people to quit in hopes they will sign up to XIV. That's probably one of the weirdest Zam logic I've witnessed and is probably more indicative of the poster's own intentions than any plans SE may have.

I for one will continue to play FFXI wholeheartedly...right up until the day the FFXIV servers go live.

I think the only realistic way people would continue to play both would depend on how they do the billing for XIV.

I think if they do something where you only have to buy another Content ID off Playonline to make a character in XIV, then it would only be an extra $1 a month for each character. So if you only have one Playonline Content ID, it's still $12.95 a month, whether that ID holds an XI or a XIV character. If you have two IDs, but for seperate games, it's $13.95 a month, and so on.

Considering the two games share a development team, I would think this would be a reasonable system. They're putting the same amount of effort and new content, thus they get the same income. Asking players to pay twice as much in subscription fees for the same amount of content would be a bad business move.

But, yeah, if I only had to pay an extra $1 or $2 a month to be able to pop in on XI, I could see myself staying for a few years yet just because of how much stuff I still have yet to accomplish.

Do you remember when you had a old dog and your parents brought a new dog home. Everyone played with new dog and the old dog eventually died. Man that sucked.

People are grasping at straws trying to deny that currently SE does not have plans for a big ffxi expansion. FFXI went into the decline stage of its life cycle from a resource perspective as soon as developers finished ToAU. WoTG has been a string it out strategy while SE committed its real talent to developing xiv.

I do not fault them for committing major resources to xiv but they have failed to reinvest in xi to a critical degree. FFxiv may be a great product but I am going to stick with xi until it loses its entertainment value.

SE has pretty much immunized me against ffxiv with their just deplorable attitude toward customors and I know for a fact that many people share a similar attitude.

For those that are denying the reality of the recent interview, regardless of current plans, things can change. Things are very difficult economially in Japan right now. Possibly the long ruling political party may even lose power because people are so disturbed about job losses. It is hard for me to envision SE just walking away from anything profitable at this time. However, it would not be surprising if they just kept it on minimal life support.

If ffxiv bombs I think that would be very bad for ffxi. One decision could be to reinforce and revitalize ffxi but another scenario would be to pull the plug on xi and put all effort to xiv. While this may seem strange to players, from a business perspective, xi is the past and xiv is the future.

Maybe on the last day of the servers they'll let Mandau and other relics drop from Ronfaure bunnies so the rest of us can at least see what they were missing for the last 4+ years...

Only because EQ2 was a colossal flop, mainly due to EQ1 players not wanting to switch.

which may explain what's going on here. SE might be afraid of an EQ2 situation where people don't want to switch to the new game so they are doing their best to kill off XI to ensure XIV success.

The real problem with the big switch theory which keeps getting mentioned as if XI is dead as soon as FFXIV goes beta is that the PS3 is a distant 2nd in terms of hardware sales in Japan to the Wii and even then console gaming in general is pretty dead there. The biggest game SE has this generation is Dragon Quest IX for the DS, a handheld.

Granted XIV will try to ride the wave of the certain sales spike from FFXIII, the PS2 was the unquestioned leader in the market there when XI released and it only managed to sell to a small fraction of the userbase.

Anyone expecting an immediate switch to XIV and that XI is dead in 1 year in terms of user acceptance and game size is seriously not thinking this through. For one, FFXIV likely will miss the 2010 release date advertised as XIII doesn't even have a release date yet, though it may go Beta on 2010, just as XI went in beta in 2002 and SE counts that as its 1st year. 2ndly, FFXIV, like XI will be a long term project for SE. It will probably go multiplatform with the next wave of next-gen platforms so at best, you're looking 2-3 years until this 'immediate' switch is completed (that is assuming their plan is to shut down XI and move everyone over to XIV, which is debatable).

So having no content from 2010 to 2012 for XI when this transition is taking place would be pretty dumb of them if they want to switch those PS2 holdoevers in Japan over to PS3.

I understand, and sympathize with the jitteriness of the community and the blame SE first mantra, but the claims vs. facts of the market doesn't jive. There will most certainly be more content added for XI.

The real concern for me is whether its add-on DLC or a full blown expansion.



Edited, Aug 24th 2009 10:10pm by Dekusutaa

It wouldn't be so bad if these new "mini expansions" were actually expansions. No new areas, no new jobs, no perks or interesting battlefields-- just storylines and a few pieces of gear.

Whatever happened to them releasing the northlands, the Far East, the Far West? I had my hopes up that the best was yet to come, and that these "mini expansions" were just buying time for that.

For years SE stated that their next MMO would not be a Final Fantasy title, would be different than FFXI, and that it would not replace FFXI.

We now know they have been working on FFXIV since CoP was released.



Square Enix has been lying in our faces about their next MMO for years.


If they lied about it being a Final Fantasy title and lied about it being different than FFXI how can we believe them when they tell us it won't replace FFXI?



By now it should be obvious that we can't trust anything SE says. They say they will keep FFXI going but how can we believe them given their history of horrible, horrible lies?

Edited, Aug 25th 2009 3:37am by Lobivopis