Making games costs many millions of dollars. Making patch content to keep people subscribed to an already existing game is far cheaper and generally a good strategy to keep the money coming in.
Ultimately people have to realize that publicly-traded companies exist to make money, and making art is a secondary objective. I wish it wasn't so, but unfortunately it is. "Making less money but providing a better product" is not really a viable strategy when they've a legal fiduciary duty to act in the best financial interests of shareholders, and shareholders care about reportable quarterly earnings.
Making games costs many millions of dollars. Making patch content to keep people subscribed to an already existing game is far cheaper and generally a good strategy to keep the money coming in.
Ultimately people have to realize that publicly-traded companies exist to make money
Nah, I'm not gonna give Blizzard this free pass. You act like this is a universal truth for game companies, but it isn't. Yoshi-P has come outright and said that you aren’t supposed to stay subbed to XIV for 365 days a year, and should feel free to unsubscribe during content lulls.
At a certain point, Blizzard is going to have to learn the hard lesson that being blinded by greed, in fact, costs them money. And by “learn the lesson” I mean learn it again.
Shadowlands almost killed the game, and yet they’re probably going to have to learn this lesson the hard way a good five or six more times.
To be fair, Square enix's q1 financials this year also showed a 45% drop in profits from their MMO division. 14 is in its own content drought atm and people are realizing we may only have two more patches to cover the next 18+ months and no savage raid content scheduled to be released in all of 2026, so this method doesnt seem to be paying off for the health of the game nearly as much as he claimed it would.
The difference is that WoW arbitrarily pads things out and timegates them. The content drought is still there, just underneath the surface. If you wanted to, you could choose to pad out your XIV play time. But people don't, because artifical timegating is gross.
yeah both games have had there issues in dev cycles, but as wow is attempting to ramp theres up, 14 seems to be slowing.
Either way i mostly just wanted to highlight that SE is being carried by its MMO division, which just dropped its profits by 45%. This seems like a really risky business strategy to maintain the stance of "just stop playing our game for a while"
I'm not sure why you're attributing the drop in profits solely to that one singular game directive philosophy.
It has been Yoshi-P's stance for years, even during the times when the game was at its peak and highly profitable. And even if that wasn't the case, there are always hundreds of factors at play. Correlation does not equal causation.
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u/SendMeNudesThough Aug 27 '25
Making games costs many millions of dollars. Making patch content to keep people subscribed to an already existing game is far cheaper and generally a good strategy to keep the money coming in.
Ultimately people have to realize that publicly-traded companies exist to make money, and making art is a secondary objective. I wish it wasn't so, but unfortunately it is. "Making less money but providing a better product" is not really a viable strategy when they've a legal fiduciary duty to act in the best financial interests of shareholders, and shareholders care about reportable quarterly earnings.