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I'd like to ask you a bit about the current service for A Realm Reborn. To maintain the game's success moving forward, are there certain parts that you're concerned about?

Yoshida:The most important thing to me is that we are honest and upfront in describing the current situation and to keep up with the promises we make. I think we were able to make good on our biggest commitment to players when we finally launched the game.

That said, A Realm Reborn is just getting started. We have concerns about whether the game would be able to survive the waves of subscription with the monthly fee since not many MMORPGs have done so successfully in the past few years. Part of it is that we're still lacking on content, so the planned additions to the game will be addressing this. We can't just sit back and celebrate.

When we first started talking about A Realm Reborn, you had mentioned that you'd be looking to respond globally to reactions, so aside from those in Japan, how have the reactions from North American players been?

Yoshida: There's not much difference in the feedback we receive from Japanese and North American users. I think a lot of players in Japan are just getting used to A Realm Reborn, but in North America a lot of players draw comparisons to previous experiences with World of Warcraft.

A Realm Reborn has familiar aspects to WoW.

Yoshida: Absolutely. People who are familiar with WoW will recognize a lot of the systems in A Realm Reborn, but there are many players in Japan who are not familiar with them and may question their implementation. That's one of the differences that we see between North American and Japanese players. However, we have about a half and half split for people who are happy with the current degree of difficulty and people who think it's too difficult. The difficulty of WoW has dropped considerably, but the people who loved the time when WoW was difficult are the people who like the difficulty in A Realm Reborn.

As far as the montly billing goes, people are becoming more pragmatic and they're only willing to pay for the things that they want to use. What that means to monthly billing is that there are players who would rather pay based on the amount of time they play in a particular month, after they've played. There used to be no debate about this, since monthly billing was the only standard for MMORPGs, but now F2P is a consideration. We see this desire for players who would rather buy items especially in North America.

Do you think it's good to have two different billing systems for a MMORPG (F2P and subscription)?

Yoshida: I don't think F2P is necessarily a bad thing, it's just one option. Talking about MMORPGs in general, there were a number of MMORPGs that launched around 2005, and almost all of them were subscription based. The thought was that this would guarantee profit from the start, and the development team wanted to depend on a stable number of users and a stable income. With the F2P model, employment is unstable, since what you sell in one month doesn't necessarily predict the next month's profits. This makes developers uneasy and makes it hard to create a roadmap for the game. It's important that content is provided reliably over time, and you need a development team and a steady income to do that.

To have stable sales for a MMORPG, you have to keep development going. After all, you need to keep providing content with updates and people need to be entertained by that content to want to keep playing. With a F2P game, though, you're not getting money from the content, but just from selling items. So then to make a lot of content you have to make a lot of items, which isn't necessarily linked to the players' enjoyment of the game. Rather than having 100% content update, then, you'd have to dedicate, say, 30% of that to items created to make money. Then it goes back to the ultimate question of what are our goals for the game in the first place.

The development of a MMORPG requires an incredible investment. It takes a lot of money raised from investors, and if you don't get the number of users you planned for at the start of your subscription service, the investors might immediately go into panic mode trying to figure out how to increase profit. These games might be forced to go F2P so that they can use the revenue to return the money to their investors.

There are many users now who don't like the idea of being bound to a game for a long time. I feel that way myself, so that I can stop at any point. I think this model works well for these kind of games where you play for a long time overall but only play a little at a time. These aren't MMOs, but F2P works well for games like "World of Tanks" and "League of Legends."

If there are particular elements which are strongly customizable, F2P works well for those cases so that players can pay to instantly expand their experience. I think that's why the choice was made for those types of games. It's important that the business model for the game is selected based on the kind of experience that you want to provide. It could be a positive change for a game to move from subscription based to F2P as long as the change is based on the users' needs rather than trying to turn an unprofitable game around.

If there's an impression that I'm determined to stick to a subscription service, that's a mistake.

Yoshida: It's not really an extreme opinion. Just because an MMORPG has a lot of content, doesn't mean that it's content driven. I'm thinking that they can coexist.

Also, even though it's said that it may be impossible, "WoW" is one example of a successful content-driven MMORPG. I think the success of WoW can be attributed to Blizzard having a future path planned and not giving up. WoW is in its ninth year and is still adding lots of monster content and other content that doesn't need to be cleared. It's on a scale now where you can play with any number of people and have your own goals.

It wasn't that way from the start, either. The balance was a mess and with the initial level 30 cap PvP was all there was to do. I was wondering what Blizzard was doing at the time, but they didn't give up.

Once the Blizzard staff started focusing on the gamers and listening to their player feedback, things changed for them. TV commercials started appearing, and the game even became popular in the United Kingdom, which was not traditionally a successful area for MMORPGs. They put amazing effort into the title from the ground up.

There are certainly may comparisons you can draw between WoW and A Realm Reborn. When you used to compare WoW and EverQuest, there was a lot of initial feedback about poor balance or not enough to do, but they continued to add content and refined their approach over time.

I think the original FFXIV was certainly a failure. But even while we were working on A Realm Reborn, we didn't neglect to continue adding content to the old FFXIV. Actually, the number of users we have now is three times as many as there were when the old FFXIV started charging. If we continued to update the content in ways that users find interesting, we were able to maintain subscriptions, although some of that might have been due to some expected value at the release of A Realm Reborn.

With WoW, there's a demonstrated example of a game which continued to add content and was hugely successful. It might be unreasonable to think that we'll be another WoW, but we'll continue to strive towards that goal.

So WoW is still one of your role models for A Realm Reborn.

Yoshida: That's right. We aren't making a fully next generation MMORPG with A Realm Reborn. We want our users to get used to the MMORPGs at the end of this generation first. Also, with A Realm Reborn, we had the tough task to move from the old FFXIV to the new one. There has never been a MMORPG in a situation like that before.

We've also decided to aim towards being more inclusive of Japanese users who haven't really experienced MMORPGs yet and may give up upon starting in WoW.

We may start adding next generation elements as we continue to expand the game. Of course, we are also planning challenges that WoW isn't doing. And also, there's that certain FF quality which you won't find in WoW.

What I'm wondering is why you feel the need to quote all of the pricing and information about Final Fantasy XIV in your post. I think most of us are lucid enough to know how much we're paying for and what we're paying for. So yes, most of us already know that having a lot of characters raises your subscription fee.

I don't agree with that either, and I have always publicly disagreed with it. HOWEVER, there's a big difference between that and the Cash Shop upgrades which are going to be offered shortly. Slippery slope.

We're talking about a lot of possibilities for future other paid cash shop upgrades now, we're talking about development focuses possibly changing to suit the needs of those who would be willing to buy something such as a bonus retainer, etc., the possibility of some subscribers being seen (maybe not publicly) as less important, which they'll have to see us as if we pay less (they're a business). Up to now we have for the most part all been on equal footing as subscribers over the course of ARR and over the course of XIV's lifetime. Until now.

Yoshida: If there's an impression that I'm determined to stick to a subscription service, that's a mistake.

I dunno, seems to be kinda praising F2P to me. Different interpretations I guess, but it sounds like they're seriously considering the idea and kind of buttering us up for it.

I wouldn't be surprised if he delivers an open apology to SWTOR during the Live Letter and admits that they were right and he was wrong, before announcing F2P. I don't know if anyone remembers this but during an interview in the Summer, he said something like "I don't know if you guys asked, but for a game like SWTOR which went F2P," Yoshi-P laughs, "nobody is even playing that game if you ask around." Something like that, it was really rude. Then he crap talked F2P models for a few paragraphs.

Doesn't seem like he would totally reverse his stance at this point unless they were going to change. No point.

That’s why you see a lot of companies that chose the subscription model, that wanted to do what we were doing, but were forced to free-to-play. They didn’t go to free-to-play by choice, because if that was the case, they would have gone free-to-play at the beginning. They’d develop it for free-to-play, not full subscription, instead of being forced to go free-to-play. We hear a lot of people saying, “Star Wars is free-to-play now, it’s great!” But then you ask them if they’re playing free-to-play Star Wars and they say, “No, not really playing it.” Everyone talks about how great it is that it went free-to-play, but then you ask around and really, there aren’t that many people who are playing it since it’s gone free-to-play. If you spend all that money on a game ,release it, and it’s filled with bugs and you don’t have enough time to do your updates, people will leave. Players need that new content. Not being able to provide it is fatal. If they were able to produce as much content as players wanted, then people would have stayed there. We don’t really believe it’s a problem with the business model. It’s how that’s handled.

I'd safely bet a thousand dollars that I'd quit this game if it goes free to play.

I have no interest in a F2P FF Title any more than I have an Elder Scrolls MMO. Or a Warcraft MMO for that matter.

Edited, Mar 19th 2014 5:51pm by Hyrist

if you disagree with me, you're a moron.