preludes wrote:
SWTOR failed for the exact same reason FFXIV ARR will fail, they spent too much money on a game that will never attract millions of players.
SWTOR would of been quite successful if it would of had a normal budget of around 50m, it just can't make the money back because it spent way too much on development. FFXIV ARR spent about the same if not more, so yeah it's not going to go well.
Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, because after you've gathered all the facts, you can see the big picture. This is what you come up with? I really wish you would have posted something more intelligent. Strange as it may be, I do love hearing a really good differing opinion. I know you post those things with the intent of getting some White Knight to run to the game's defense. It detracts from it. That aside, I have some thoughts.
Hindsight being a wonderful thing, I've learned from FFXI, that an MMO doesn't need millions of subscribers to be profitable. What do you think they spent the money on exactly? You seem to have a wonderful imagination, you should make some more assumptions. I don't care for Star Wars, but I did hear they had quality voice acting/story. Maybe some of the money went there. I've also heard that they lacked things to do at the end game stage. That leaves me wondering what else could have taken up all those development resources. You seem to know though.
There has never been a company that took a failed MMO and rebuilt it from the ground up. Even you can see that as a huge financial risk. We all love to talk ourselves up and profess/imply that we know what's best, or what would, and wouldn't work. Running with that train of thought, would you take that risk? If yes, how would you feel about failing? Have you ever failed at something? If yes, when you try again, do you try twice as hard? Three times? How hard? The most beautiful thing about ARR, is its "people" inspired development. There is no "stick up the ***" person doing whatever he wants. I'm more worried about Final Fantasy XV, than I am ARR. At least Yoshi knows what not to do, and shows interest in what the majority wants.
If ARR fails, it wont be for the reason you stated. It seems like everyone is aware how badly ARR's failure is going affect SE, but never factor how that impacts the way they handle it. For some reason, people like you think that the company's just going to sit on their ***, and just go down without a fight. You over simplify everything. I can see it now, "ARR fails because fans found out that it spent too much money in development." Genius right?
If this were a new dev team trying to making it, I'd be less optimistic. Luckily, some people can afford mistakes, while other's can't. It's also fortunate enough to carry the "Final Fantasy" name, mostly likely the only reason they might pull this off. The only thing ARR needs to be successful, is to be a fun game that people actually want to play. No one is going to ignore it just because it had a bad launch, while every review site is saying how great it is. Obviously, if the reviews are bad, they wont come back. That pretty much makes their path forward very clear. If they put more than 50 million or more into the right areas of development, that just might be what they need to attract people. Seeing as we have no idea what they're developing in great detail, I'm going to assume your negativity is a personal issue, not a logical one.
Try and recall how the name "Final Fantasy" came to be. If failure means the end of the company (Which I hope it does
), that might give them good incentive to stop all the bad ideas they've been spending money on for the past decade. Perhaps snap them out of this complacency "we" enabled. I do hope they pull out all the stops, so they don't fail again. That's what I would do. They even asked fans for input, which never would have happened without the failure. (I hope interacting with fans continues) If it fails again, maybe it's time to move on.
P.S.
I miss early 1.0 days when the negativity had real merit. It was an anti SE field day! White Knights were slaughtered daily!