Famitsu PAX East Interview (3/14) - Translation

[Edelweiss]

Remember how hopeful we were about Hunts? Yea. I'm keeping my expectations pretty low for most of what is planned.

You. Shut up.

Stop killing my dreams of a Skies of Arcadia-esque adventure in the clouds, with awful RNG and no_fun_allowed.jpg endgame, before they've even begun.

[Niiro]

FC housing 3.0, calling it.

[Shenrien]

But... we already have FC housing..

[Niiro]

I'll spell it out:

It'll be a large gil sink with lots of flashy customization but will ultimately be of little real use aside from a handful of conveniences and niche rewards.

If they make FC airships difficult/expensive to get into, the rewards will suck because they're not going to put a lot of resources into content that people won't be able to access.

[Stef]

Yoshida: ...taking your airship to the skies and the activities there is a major theme throughout the patch 3.X series.

Yoshida: So it’s going to be very major content that will become available throughout the 3.x patch series.

Yoshida: So over the course of about a year or so, this content will continue to evolve and expand.

Yoshida: So, this whole idea of Free Company and Free Company crafting as well as the airship, or building an airship is one of the major end game content that the development team is putting a lot of love and effort into.

Sounds like they're putting a lot of resources into it.

[Niiro]

I will be quite surprised if it turns out to be a legit end game activity with actual challenges and rewards.

[Stef]

It seems like that's their intention at least. Yoshi-P said the challenges and rewards would be somewhere between CT and Coil:

Q8: Currently, there are a lot of content for the hardcore users and the casual users, but not many for the mid-tier users. Are there any plans to implement additional content for the mid-tier users that are able to beat Crystal Tower, but not the Coil of Bahamut?

A8: In the upcoming expansion, we will be introducing a new content for the mid-tier users which is currently referred to as “free company craft” (final name TBD).

[Source - Live Letter XVIII Q8]

[ronin sparthos]

It needs a Tanaka-ism. Like your airship running out of ceruleum en route to Ridill Island, killing everyone in the process and resetting your airship progress to level 1.

[Lucavi]

Seems like they didn't want to do it initially(flying), but realized that they're now married to the concept so they're doubling down on it. I wonder if the recent success of the game has expanded their development budget? Obviously SE is rich enough to fully invest in whatever project they want (much like Nintendo, which has enough billions to effectively run in the red every year until 2050+ and still come out in the green), but I wonder if successful titles can get "promoted" into larger operating budgets if they're found to be successful?

[ronin sparthos]

Yoshida's got a strong argument for more cash if he wanted it. You know, like Lazarus'ing FFXIV.

[Buffy]

Can make a strong argument FFXIV hasn't even broke even yet.

Two MMO development costs and now and expansion? I mean what's that cost? 1 billion?

[Lucavi]

^ I wouldn't take that out of the realm of consideration, but its a safe bet that whatever the cost, SE has extreme confidence in Yoshi's product that it'll recoup any loss. I know the dude is tired, but he's got to feel good about the state of things.

[Stef]

I'm sure they have quite a significant budget. I'm guessing it has increased since launch, but maybe not by all too much since it must've been pretty substantial to begin with. If I remember correctly they had brought in people from various teams across SE in order to be able to complete 2.0 within 2.5 years. I vaguely remember them saying there were something like 300 people involved in total including the core and peripheral teams. That of course went down to a much smaller team after launch.

We can make some very rough estimates of what FFXIV has made in terms of profit:

• SWTOR cost about $200 million (BG won't let me link to the GS article, but here's the Google search... first link), but I don't think FFXIV cost that much each time... so lets take a more conservative estimate and say $50 million for the original and another $50 million for ARR.
• Let's assume that the 4 million accounts figure FFXIV uses are people that bought the game (both 1.0 and 2.0). With legacy players, 2.0 players, PS3 and PS4 players lets say that the average people spend on buying the game is $40. That's $160 million in sales right there.
• I'm guessing that the majority of players pay $12.99 a month in subscription fees, but lets say $15/month on average for the sake of argument.
• It's hard to guess how much of this is spent on salaries, server infrastructure, promotion, and other overheads... but in this SWTOR article (again, Google search) they said that 500,000 subscribers would be "substantially profitable, but it's not the kind of thing that we would write home about", so let’s be generous and assume that you need 250.000 subscribers to break even with monthly costs on a game as large and well-maintained as FFXIV.
• Now let’s assume that the roughly 600k semi-daily FFXIV users figure from a while back is still accurate. Let’s extrapolate from that and assume that, on average, FFXIV has 1 million active subscribers per month. (well over 35% retention rate 1 month after launch, well over 30% retention rate 6 months after launch before PS4 and China release, and now we’re at 4 million sales.)

With all of these assumptions and estimates of cost, FFXIV would have made about $430 million in revenue in its first 18 months with about $170 million in costs. Of course there could be a lot more that they've spent on developing 3.0 and on marketing, but there's also other sources of revenue like the cash shop.

It's also worth pointing out that the $430 million revenue estimate and $100 million initial development costs I worked out above includes the cost of developing and the sales of 1.0. This means that there's likely only a little bit more than $430 million in revenue spread over 5 years (longer if you include the development time of 1.0 which I think was another 5 years).

Here's an article about Tomb Raider in 2013: http://www.vg247.com/2013/03/27/anal...es-to-succeed/. Now admittedly, SE’s expectations for the game were pretty unrealistic, but it’s something to compare to at least. SE sold 3.4 million copies in 4 weeks for $49.99 per unit and called it a failure. That is $170 million in revenue. Now imagine the opportunity cost of allocating a team on developing an MMO for 2.5+ years. I'm sure they would expect quite a bit more than $170 million to call it an unqualified success.

If $170 million for Tomb Raider in 4 weeks was considered a failure, $430-450 million over 5 years is probably not that great for SE in absolute terms. What it does represent is potential, and that's why SE has a right to be excited about FFXIV.

[Lucavi]

Two hundred mil for that piece of dogshit. Money well spent.

[BerenTebogo]

Still in a FC of basically myself. Hoping to build a one-man airship np.

[Lucavi]

Tisi and I are makin' our own loveboat.

[Skai]

You can come join us in Handwork. /lola

[Lucavi]

Hate you all.