So I don't know if most actually knew the original idea behind Square releasing 2-3 mmos but the plan was to make multiple mmos that all ran alongside each other to give Square a large and profitable MMO division of their company. They couldn't compete with WoW on a single title, so they thought they could have 2-3 running at the same time. Sounds good in theory and indeed it does work for some companies (like Ncsoft etc).
To me, as an MMO player this shows how little experience Square had with the industry and it's players, mainly because of how they decided to do it.
So again, the plan was to run multiple mmos side by side as a means to supercharge some long-term profits into the company (each having its own dedicated development team pushing out content). FFXIV was never seen as a successor to FFXI by Square, they were supposed to run side by side for twice the profits. Now most people that knew the market would know that if they wanted to do that well, it should not of been called FF (direct competition for each other) or they should of done all they could to remove any doubt (not lowering the XI dev team size would of been a good start to that). Making another FF title made it appear a successor and there were all kinds of problems with it being seen that way.
What they actually did was create a competition between their 2 titles (which is of courser the worst possible situation) and turn the FF fans of their 2 titles against each other. They basically made a Gw2 vs WoW type competition between their own 2 titles. Keep in mind that FFXI is still a very profitable game (and very much more before the announcment of Rapture) so damaging your own product with a new one is not something you want to have happen.
They have ofc gained some nonFFXI players from games like War/WoW for XIV but again, ultimately that's what they have managed to do. Canabalise their own players that were already paying them money to play another game (many of whome are now paying them less subscription than they were on FFXI).
Look around the net and you will see XIV players bashing XI on all the XI forums and taking delight in its player loss and you will see XI players hating on XIV and wishing it fail. This isn't good for either game and it's incredibly bad for Square.
Ultimately I don't know what Square can do now, they could end up with less players on the both titles combined than they had on XI at it's peak or they could end up with more players but be paying vastly more on running costs than they were before.
I think this was one of the reasons the leadership of the company was decimated, they took a very profitable arm of the company and greatly damaged it.
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/square-enix-developing-another-mmog-report-6315426
Edited, Sep 21st 2013 10:06am by preludes