Let’s put this front and center just to start things off because I’m annoyed: Final Fantasy XIV is not a game that is single-handedly funding all of Square-Enix but never gets any of its money allocated back to the game’s development. It is not even a game that gets an unreasonably small budget based on the profit it brings in on the regular. If you are part of the crowd that believes, to any degree, that Square-Enix is taking money made by this game and unfairly using it on projects that it knows are not going to make money, you are operating under several layers of misunderstanding.
This all feels so ridiculously obvious that putting it out in text feels a bit like saying “no, there is not a magical man in a red suit with a white beard who magically distributes presents on Christmas Eve around the world.” And yet somehow this myth keeps persisting among people who want to believe that FFXIV would deliver all the content they want and then some and fix all of their personal bugbears if it just had a budget commensurate with its success, which (they claim) it does not. Instead, the argument goes, Square-Enix diverts all of its money into other projects that it knows will fail!
All of that is stupid. Let’s pick apart some of why it’s dumb.
To start with, there’s a man I need to introduce you to named Naoki Yoshida. No, not producer and director of FFXIV Naoki Yoshida. Not producer of Final Fantasy XVI Naoki Yoshida, either. No, we’re talking executive officer at Square-Enix and head of Creative Studio III who also sits on the Final Fantasy guidance committee Naoki Yoshida.
Square has only five total creative units that oversee game development. Most of those license and contract with external studios, even. This is not a man who works off in a shed and has to occasionally travel to the corporate offices to beg, hat in hand, to please allocate a couple hundred yen so that the shed might get a fresh lightbulb. He may not have unilateral authority, but he does have quite a bit of power within the company.
Of course, the comorbid idea here is that Square-Enix is diverting money into projects it knows won’t work. Which is… well, that’s thorny. Equally silly, just also covered in thorns.
Here’s a fine example: Forspoken. This one gets touted a lot as a project that Square-Enix “knew” would be unsuccessful, and… like… just one look at the protagonist alone tells you why that narrative should set off some red flags, yeah? I’m not saying the game is underappreciated (I haven’t played it, although the bits I did see seemed fun enough), just that about half of the “projects Square-Enix knew would fail” are ones that would fail because of obvious dogwhistles. The other half are either projects that the speaker in question just doesn’t want or ones that would have succeeded if it had been marketed right!
Feel free to make jazz hands at your screen.
The thing is that a moment of thought reveals that to be kind of ridiculous, too. I mean, Neo: The World Ends With You is a sequel to a game that was critically praised but did not sell well. Square-Enix made a sequel to it and said it didn’t meet sales expectations, but everyone grousing about it insists that it wasn’t marketed right and refuses to accept that maybe this was a niche title with narrow appeal. A lot of publishers wouldn’t bother making a sequel then!
Development budgets do not work the way people want to imagine they do. You do not say, “All right, FFXIV made $X yen, so its development budget should be that much” because if you do things that way, no new game ever gets made. You look at how much money the studios brought in, pool all of it, decide how to allocate your operating budget based on further projects and ideas, and you go from there.
By all accounts, FFXIV is not a game that suffered from having too little budget at any point. A more realistic estimate would be that its initial version had too much budget because Hiromichi Tanaka had a lot of seniority and respect and no one was there to look at the game and say, “Holy heck, this game is going to be awful; we need to do something.” And then Square-Enix gave Yoshida more money and time to rebuild the game.
And since the relaunch, FFXIV’s budget has consistently gone up and been good. It’s entirely fair to say that the promotional budget is not the same as the development budget, but Square-Enix does not routinely pay to rent out event halls or do live-action commercials for games that aren’t making money. Nothing Yoshida has said ever indicated that the problems the game cannot solve are the result of money. When the devs were trying to get more servers for the game during the height of the pandemic, he even specifically said that Square was willing to pay over market price to get servers up faster.
“But development has slowed a bit! Patches have longer gaps now!” By two weeks. And we know that’s not about budget because Yoshida has told us why that happened.
There was a whole lengthy stream in which Yoshida outright discussed the future of the game and said that his team had long been working really hard through the launch of Endwalker but that it was, in fact, an exhausting schedule. So the schedule was changed from three and a half months to four months. That’s it. This has nothing to do with budget and everything to do with taking burden off the people working on the game.
And you can say that if the team had a higher budget, it could double the team size, but I promise you, doubling the team size does not in and of itself make things twice as fast. There are countless examples of this fallacy, codified in what’s called the Ringelmann effect. A bigger team is not a faster team by default, for much the same reason that you cannot actually brute-force monkeys into writing Shakespeare.
What all of this really comes down to is a sense of people who want the big thing they’re looking forward to in the future to be here now. They want to have Beastmaster or new custom deliveries or more allied society quests or whatever be here now instead of on the same schedule the game has always worked at (disregarding that there are, in fact, vanishingly few studios that can maintain an effective schedule of these things across a decade). It’s an anger that there isn’t more because dang it, I’m bored, and I want more game.
To that I say… jeez, guys, I almost certainly play more of this game than you do and I expect less out of it. Take a break. Go play some other things! I definitely do! I spend about zero minutes out of my week getting upset that things I’m looking forward to aren’t here yet, especially when I know full well when they’re coming and at most I’m just excited for them to arrive.
But stop acting like there’s some conspiracy wherein FFXIV doesn’t get a “fair” budget because Square-Enix just wants to steal its lunch money. That’s just dumb.
Feedback is sort of welcome down below or via email to eliot@massivelyop.com; I mean, you can do what you want, but if your response to “this idea is wrong” is “nuh-uh,” then maybe you should just go take a nice walk. Next week, I’m going to do something a bit unusual and take a loot back through some of my predictions about Dawntrail because some of them were very wrong, but a couple were very right.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
