To say the least, Final Fantasy 14 got off to a rocky start. It was so unstable, in fact, that it was torn down and rebuilt from the ground up by a fresh development team. A poor response to the point that the game had to be discarded and development restarted would be enough to destroy nearly any developer, but SquareEnix was not one of them. The new edition of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, which was launched after considerable reworking, was a huge success, and the game has been making decent business ever since. It is one of the few MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games, for the uninitiated) that has never abandoned the subscription model in favor of the now-common free-to-play model.
For reference, after barely a year as a subscription-only game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMO developed by the renowned company Bioware and obviously based on the popular Star Wars brand, added a free-to-play option. Because the MMO industry is so competitive and crowded with outstanding games, it takes a lot of effort to maintain a large enough player base to rely on subscription payments to keep the servers running and fund future expansions. The servers for Final Fantasy 14 have been up and operating for eight years. There have been four major expansions for the game, each of which is considerably superior to the original in terms of the plot while also expanding the gameplay with new raids to defeat and new classes to master.
It was warmly received by fans. However, a curious situation has lately occurred, with new players entering in previously unheard-of numbers, leaving many in the MMO community, both players and developers, confused. In contrast to Final Fantasy 14, World of Warcraft had a considerably more successful launch and has maintained that popularity over the years, ruling as the King of MMOs despite a seemingly never-ending stream of supposedly WOW-killers. There’s no question that Warcraft will continue to be a profitable game for its creators. Blizzard, but it’s crown has been laying on its head a little wonky recently. For a long time, veteran players have been protesting about the game’s simplicity, to the point that a parallel version called World of Warcraft Classic was released, which included all of the game’s earlier, more popular features. The main game, on the other hand, continued to run and be updated and modified.
Those modifications appeared to be excessive. Many people were disappointed with World of Warcraft’s most recent addition, Shadowlands. It resulted in a mass exodus from the game, with gamers seeking better pastures elsewhere. Final Fantasy 14 was an obvious pick for many because of its good reputation. Asmongold, a prominent Twitch streamer, was one of many who switched to FF from WOW and took many of his fans along with him. Other streamers were quick to follow suit. Due to the high number of new players, SquareEnix had to temporarily halt the creation of new characters since their servers were overworked. They’ve now fixed the problem and increased server capacity to compensate, but the fact that they even had to struggle testifies to their unexpected success.
It also helps that Final Fantasy 14 is cross-platform, allowing players to play together on PC and consoles. It probably helped that the departure from World of Warcraft coincided with a 60 percent discount on the PC version of Final Fantasy 14 as part of Steam’s summer sale. Furthermore, enabling previous members to play for free for an extended fortnight as part of the Make it Rain campaign has aided in the unexpected influx of gamers to the already popular, and now extremely popular MMO. Today is a hot summer day in SquareEnix’s offices. But there’s no denying it’s a little chilly inside Blizzard HQ. With this, a tepid response to the impending Overwatch 2, and the departure of a large number of Blizzard’s long-serving workers like Jeff Kaplan, things are looking bleak for the gaming titan.
