Eh, sounds a lot like I'll be waiting until November to do this stuff. If it's starting as low as lv 50-60 and slowly going up to 117 then I'm not too interested in blowing through the beginning parts as they come out; would rather experience it all in one chunk.
You're not taking into account the fact that regardless of what happens, their development is forever tied to their PS2 development kit. They stated as much (and we've known this for years now besides). It's not like the game is from PC source material, it's PS2. We don't know how much they will save by dropping PS2/XBOX support, but it's obvious it's not enough to save the game from it's fate, otherwise they would.
Regardless of this, they had already gave it a shot making the Windows version the primary version itself, but they couldn't pull it off at all. I have a feeling that they structured their development around the PS2 since the beginning of FFXI, and then ported it over to PC and XBOX before releasing patches/expansions. It makes sense that they would end general support after ending the PS2 version, because it would basically mean they are left to revamp the PC version... which they don't have money to do.
Not one person refuted the numbers I posted as to the operating costs of the game as well as the salaries of the dev/production staff a couple pages back. I even challenged anyone to offer any other kind of insight to what the potential costs are, and still no one even said "no those numbers are wrong".
So please, what do you think XI's monthly cost is to SE?
This is of course assuming what they told us is correct... the problem with that is a lot of the technical things about the game they have told us simply have not true. Note they are effectively porting over to phones. It clearly can be done and at a cost that at least nexon finds acceptable. not to mention all the private servers people have made for fun in there spare time
No one is refuting numbers indeed. Likely because they glossed over them as silliness, much like I did.
I don't care to sit down and offer insight as to what their operating costs are, I'm not going to go balls deep into actual numbers to win an argument with you. Instead, in this argument I use empirical evidence that borders on the reality instead, based on what this article presents. And guess what? It matched my observations and expectations from forever before that.
You're sitting here, talking about numbers when it's pretty obvious to anyone who read that article that they are not willing to fund the game anymore in any form. It should have been obvious that at some point their overall budget was severely reduced. You have the man, Matsui, on record stating this:
"...Looking at the actual numbers, things are shrinking little by little, so we made the final decision to give one final ending that everyone can enjoy. Rather than adding a bunch of small things over a longer period of time, I decided to make one last climax to end things.
then this:
"...To continue development, ultimately the only two ways are to either reduce spending or increase our revenues..."
But you're still arguing that they can continue development? I mean who knows more about the goings on about the FFXI team, you or Matsui, the Producer?
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I would instead encourage private server people to take this moment to go nuts on developing the game in their own way. There's also a vast difference between duplicating a server's assets and having to reprogram monster AI (key point) vs completely porting over a game to another platform. Yes, private servers exist, but even then monster pathing/attacking algorithms have to be created and/or recreated.
Phone applications have always been much cheaper in development, which is why they are even going this route in the first place.
Matsui doesn't have any reason to lie about the troubles of porting the game over to PC.
I think we know that... why is it hard to let people vent. A lot of people feel sort of betrayed by these decisions because they don't make sense (to us at the least). Even in the interview he said they were all shocked, of course. If Matsui isn't to blame for the decisions than its stupid SE making stupid SE mistakes. Nothing lasts forever, but that doesn't mean you can't make something profitable to last longer. Everquest is still around with its 20+ expansion, its just like ugh.
i believe the situation with FFXI is that they now have to answer for poor business decisions made in the past. and SE has made so many in the past. The biggest 2 were Fabula Nova Chrystallis and FFXIV 1.0, and along the way there are other more minor things like All The Bravest and naming a game Mevius FF.
but this one, I think is forgivable. With FFXI, i don't think they'd had imagined it would continue for 14 years as it has. Perhaps one could say they had a lack of foresight to not futureproof development of the game, but back in 2002 nobody knew that the MMORPG market would explode the way it did, or catch on as long as it has. So for FFXI to last so long and expand the way it did on PS2 technology is pretty impressive.
I wonder if they could have worked on a new client at some earlier point in FFXI's development history when the game was still making bigger money. but they probably didnt early on because the PS2 support was still strong, and couldn't later on because of what happened with FFXIV.. and 1 MMO upheaval was costly enough as it were.
It's kinda sad then to know that this really is the end of content. I'm hoping it'll be good. 1 new area per update seems a bit little, but it must be pretty huge then, considering how they said the content would exceed Abysseas? Plus theres only so much story you can do in a new zone. The rest has to be other content like NMs and battles. Am struggling to think of a huge area from vanilla/rotz/cop that hasn't been used in Dynamis, Shadowreign or Abyssea yet lol.
I am still curious to know how Nexon will bring FFXI to the smartphone tho. Mostly visually. If it were possible for this remake to be the new life of XI, then i would not mind so much by the time it's released to hop over. That said I don't expect anything from them so soon.
Of course, everyone should feel free to be mad and blame SE (Tanaka). It's bullshit and they don't give a fuck. ARR is for all intents and purposes prospering, so you can bet your top dollar they don't give a fuck. These are mistakes that could have been corrected well over 7 years ago when they were rolling in the dough, but they didn't. So here we are.
Everquest has 20+ expansions, but Everquest isn't tied to a 15~17 year old developer kit that can't be updated. That's the main caveat.
At least I can respect Matsui -- he tried every avenue that he could before coming to the conclusion of ending FFXI, it's awesome enough that he even looked into the viability of completely remaking the game for the PC platform. I think the read sad part of this is that Final Fantasy XI will be the only numbered title in the FF series from here on out that will have the lowest replay value. Everyone is going to beat it all once and call it a day forever.
Assuming the mobile app follows the same story and private servers are still around, that doesn't sound completely true.I think the read sad part of this is that Final Fantasy XI will be the only numbered title in the FF series from here on out that will have the lowest replay value.
Rest of the interview is up, primarily focused on Grandmasters and the native app, with a few additional questions for the Grandmasters producer, everything under "Expanding FFXI" is the last part that I just added.
As I was going through this, I decided to listen to some music from FFXI. Started up the ToAU soundtrack randomly and even though I've been gone for over a year and a half now it only took a second of the percussion at the beginning of the Aht Urhgan song ("Bustle of the Capital") to get me sentimental and super nostalgic, especially after going through this interview.
all you're sayin bruh. You make the bold statement that XI is not just losing money, but, and I quote, "hemorrhaging money", which unless you have an alternate definition of that word means that its losing money at a beyond alarming rate, and yet you wont back up with any attempts to put any numbers behind state statement. The fact that your only response to backing up your belief that XI is "hemorrhaging money" is "fuck you, I'm not justifying anything, suck my dick" means you're doing nothing other than trolling here at this point.
Right it is different by what reason would it be harder for SE to make it pc only? They have the same options available to them then some...
Sure they do. It's easier to say we just can't than we wont. Similar to how they claim they can't make smaller wait times or faster gear swapping despite the fact we've been doing it for years. It saves much more face to imply something will just cost too much than to say it's just not earning the amount of profits you'd like
This. Sho is basing his points off of some weird insight he thinks he is gleaning from what Matsui said in the interview, which is complete PR bullshit. The only actual hard fact in the interview that came out of his mouth was that sub numbers have been dwindling for a while. SE is a massive company, so if something isn't making a large amount of profit, they're going to can it. I mean just look at their initial attitude towards the new Tomb Raider. They deemed it a failure even though it sold more copies than most games even dream of selling. I think they've since revised their stance on that particular thing but there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that XI is still making a profit. It's just not a large enough one in comparison to SE's other projects to continue support. They can't come out and say that though because then they'd be admitting to the entire world that they're greedy fucking assholes, and that's not good business.
They should just start recreating the whole ff11 universe for the next 14 expansion. Has anybody played Terra Battle? Just have Alexander turn out to be a space ship that destroys Eorzea and everybody ends up going on a intergalactic voyage to Vanadiel. I mean why not? We got a time travel/timeskip from 1.0 to 2.0 lol. Have Alexander crash into the planet, bringing pieces of Eorzea with it. I mean Eorzea seems pretty fucked anyways. Just nuke it.
Quoting nynjas number for anyone who cares.I dont doubt that money factors in, money factors in to everything. I think they just dont want to keep the resources to keep XI going (money out), and they're hoping that a chunk of the remaining XI playerbase moves to XIV (money in). I'm not entirely sure how much it costs just to keep the XI servers up, I cant imagine it being more than 10k/month on electricity / bandwidth / maintenance, I'm sure the skeleton devs/pubs gets anywhere from 4-10k/month, and I doubt theres more than 20 people there. Lets say 10 at the low end of 4k, 6 at the mid range of 7.5k, and 4 at the high end of 10k, that's 125k out per month. Add in the 10k/month maintenance, and you're looking at 135k/month. Now presuming every server has 1200 active POLID's and one additional mule per character, that's 16.5k income per server, over 16 servers is close to 268k per month.
One comment I have, although I don't know how different it is in Japan, but people cost more than their compensations. Employers need to pay taxes, and benefits. I'm the US it'd anywhere from 20 to 40% of your salary.
I did a quick Google search, and found the following: http://www.bls.gov/fls/ichcc.pdf
According to chart 3 on page 3, in Japan, for manufacturing employees (I assume taxes would be similar and shouldn't change much between sectors) it costs 43% of their salary to cover benefits.
So take your 125k estimate and multiple it by 1.43, and now employees cost 178.75k.
(I'm personally leaning to this being a retarded decision, but you keep going on and on about how your numbers are right and that no one refuted you, so...)
They are prolly betting the majority of people will go to either XIV/DQX but I doubt it will happen