20th Anniversary Reddit AMA

I don't care about Square Enix, I just want more meaningful additions to the game I spend most of my free time in. Square are never going to fund another expansion because they don't care about XI, and so if the only way to get that kind of thing is via a kickstarter then so be it.

It's a purely selfish act, it's not a charitable donation. Its getting something you really want, in probably the only way it's going to happen.

It's even a benefit to Square themselves because once it's funded and paid for, the people who didn't donate to the kickstarter can still buy the expansion for $40 after the fact. It will bring more people back too.

It's win win to everyone if it happens.

They are still fully capable of making new zones, Reisenjima is one of the best zones in the game.

They'll never take the handout.

But I still think it's worth a try, because the alternative is do nothing.

As consumers, we can't launch a kickstarter or gofundme or any crowd funding venture on behalf of Square Enix.

It's a legal nightmare, we have no financial concept or estimates of what the scope of work will actually cost.

We have guestimates based on various levels of experience in the industry and assumptions of what their technical stack is based on the time period in which it was constructed. The real picture might be far worse than any of us imagine. :shrug:

A petition might not work, but neither will anything else. The goal is to create awareness and put numbers on the board.

Why not kickstart our own game instead? Change some names around to avoid legal issues, but create a geographically similar map and only include the things we each collectively like about the experience.

We wouldn't have to recreate the entirety of FFXI, just little chunks here and there. Give it a couple decades and we'd probably catch up to the content available on the live servers.

EDIT: I'm really only slightly keen on video game production and development, but I have seen people make some pretty cool stuff in modern engines in record time.

If anyone wants something to change, I'd advise being mega rich and attending a shareholders meeting

Do you have any idea how much it would cost to make a game like FFXI? Projects that have made millions on Kickstarter with less grandiose scopes have failed, and that's ignoring the fact that you'd have to find a studio with MMORPG experience to make it in the first place. Finding any joe random indie dev studio to do it wouldn't work.

I appreciate that everyone is in the Bargaining phase of the cycle of grief here, but it's time to come back to Earth. The legality and, beyond that, the willingness for SE to accept a third party kickstarter to then divert development resources toward making an expansion pack for a game that they have clearly written off as half way in the grave is outrageous to even think about. And where, exactly, does the money go when the scheme inevitably fails and SE either ignores or laughs away the proposition in question?

If the developers get the clear they are allowed to accept it and they say how much they need to make an expansion we can try raise it, if they won't communicate then it's a non-starter.

Chances are they won't even acknowledge it at all, and if so that's the end of the story.

At the end of the day they don't want to risk money making an expansion, so if we can offset the risk and effectively buy the expansion before they make it there is no risk for them.

I have no idea how much an expansion would even cost to develop.

I personally would not pledge anything to a third-party fundraising campaign due to concerns of liability. There are no legal repercussions other than a potential lawsuit if whoever is executing the fundraiser just vanishes with the bag once a goal is hit.

And as we all know, the FFXI community has such a long, concrete history of trustworthiness.

honestly, as pie in the sky as it is, this is a much better idea than a kickstarter created on someone(a corp, no less) else's behalf.

I would urge anyone looking at this to at least do some research into the subject before committing any of their personal energy toward it. It is a well documented phenomenon that 9 out of 10 of the MMO projects on Kickstarter end up being scams or failures. It costs too much money and requires too specific of a skillset to truly guarantee success or even a reasonable degree of success. Most of the ones that do succeed also make additional money outside of their Kickstarter campaign, usually much more than the campaign itself, after the fact because the original goal was far too small.

Most of the people setting up these kickstarters have grand plans of their perfect MMO and make loads of money only to find out that it costs much, much, much more than they thought it would to get their foot in the door and that they don't have enough people with the correct skillsets to make their dreams a reality.

The logistics of an operation like this would be a nightmare and I will outright say that I don't believe that anyone who posts on this website would be capable of managing it.

just google Chronicles of Elyria to get a textbook example of what he's talking about, as well as a real-life demo of Sunken Cost Fallacy in action ^

to be clear, I was not advocating that anyone here try and make their own indie mmo. I just thought it was a more realistic proposition than getting SE to accept a crowd-funded FFXI remaster.

This can't be stressed enough. Building and running a Software as a Service company is extremely difficult.

I mean, I've done it, but not in the gaming industry, because fuuuuuuck that.

Dont you get a refund from these if they dont meet the goal?

Only if

A) the person or company running the kickstarter issues the refunds

B) the person or company running the kickstarter can afford to issue the refunds

C) kickstarter also agrees to process all of the refunds

you are never guaranteed a refund on kickstarter

Idk how easy kickstarter is to deal with international funding. I personally backed Bloodstained and it was dual translated into both ebglish and JP, but I don't want to make assumptions. The thought is that you need to be able to include the JP community if you really want this to create the desired pressure.

If the desired outcome is that we are trying to good faith prefund content while also bad faith shame them into doing anything to improve the game. Then we need to make sure that discussion and reputation is coming home to where our perceived opposition lives. We probably can't reach disconnected executives through the community team or the developers who are blatantly the only ones keeping this game going with a NA/EU only effort. It's much more likely they will care about their preceptions from their peers at other JP based companies, who they would actually have an akward conversation with. It's one thing to be able to brush off criticism for foreigners, it's much harder to do it from your own population.

The first part is the developers saying how much they need and if they would accept it, they would also need to be clear it would be for a specific thing such as one expansion pack and not all this other stuff people are thinking of.

Second would be finding someone trustworthy to set it up, I'm not going to name anyone but I'm sure there are some people who are trusted that could set up the page. I'm not talking about rando posters.

Honestly I don't get why the developers or someone at the company doesn't just set one up, we have been playing this game for 20 years we are going to fund something like this in enough numbers pretty easily.

I swear this is a real question, and I am not trying to mock anyone, but: what do you think will happen?

There are two scenarios, with kickstarter: if the project doesn't get funded, then like Draylo asks, no money changes hands, everyone moves on.

The real trouble starts when it DOES get funded, because now money has changed hands. Whoever ran that KS would immediately get a weapons-grade cease-and-desist from every lawyer at SE, while they simultaneously released a statement praising the passion of their fans.

Nothing would get made, the KS user would have to refund everyone or get sued by a bunch of people (and whether they ate the kickstarter fees or made the backers do it, who knows), and everyone ends up more miserable than they were before, plus a little poorer.

And that is probably the BEST case scenario!

Well i felt great about not trying to be mega rich up to this point in my life, but now you've ruined it *laughing emoji*

pretty simple, management doesn't want to develop the game anymore. funding doesn't enter into it.

It wouldn't even begin unless Square gave the go ahead and stated how much they need.

The most annoying thing about FFXI is the developers are JP and the community team never really talk to us.

It would be great it a CM could pass this on and see if it's even a possibility at all.

So basically safest bet would fall to Matsui to accept the idea and the company does the kickstarter. Just all seems too grandiose in scale. I dont see why they wouldn't except for public image but most wouldnt care given this is an old game. I would imagine an expansion or any serious work on the game would be extremely costly but maybe if the public raised a bulk of it they would do the rest. I mainly thought a petition would be a better gauge of interest. Damn you SE and XIV

we still don't have a complete official English translation of the anniversary ***, so take that into consideration as well when looking at something as big as sending a petition to the dev team and hoping for them to actually respond to it

realistically, they don't give a single *** about us or our opinions and just maintain the minimum required interaction with us

I disagree here. I think the developers would very much want to make it. You can not work in the games industry unless you love it - the money is a fraction of what you'd make elsewhere, the hours are ***, the stress is unreal, it's just not a job you would take if you didn't actually love what you do.

Every indication is that everyone who's ever worked on FFXI genuinely loves it and Vana'diel. Maybe people disagree, but again, you can't do this kind of work if you don't love it, and love the thing you're working on.

There are reasonable business arguments to be made against it, and the two big ones are logistics and marketing.

Logistically, there isn't anyone to actually work on it. I say this, because Yoshida is on the record in multiple interviews, when asked about speeding up FFXIV development, that the problem is one of personnel - there's only so many people qualified to do this kind of work. This is at least half the reason XI uses XIV's staff for things like server maintenance - there's not enough people and XIV has the bigger budget, so it's easier to just loan them out like a timeshare, because you literally can't hire anyone else, even if you had the budget.

Marketing, this has been beaten to death, but for the sake of emphasis: they're already riding the wave of a successful MMO - XIV continues to expand and given how many bets SE makes that do NOT pay off, if they did anything to sincerely jeopardize XIV's growth the shareholders would sue them.

What I think they should do is bring back the shared subscription, and use it as a way to funnel people to XI during XIV's gaps between patches. It'd boost sub numbers and make the case for improving/upgrading XI stronger. Not saying it'd happen, but at that point it's at least a discussion.

an actual expansion costs hundreds of thousands minimum, even if you raise that amount then they're on the hook to spend it to commission the expansion, any potential costs after the fact exceeding what was raised are risk for them, and the only potential upside is player retention/gain

as we saw with adoulin, the jump in player numbers only lasted a few months, followed by rapid hemorrhage because more old content had been invalidated than new content was made

there are a ton of reasons they'd never do it, it's like prothescar said, straight bargaining and delusion

(don't get me wrong, i'd throw some dough in myself if i believed it was viable, but it really isn't)

why are people now talking as if the reality in which SE really wants to keep developing FFXI, but just can't come up with the cash,actually exists?

it's the same reality where petitions actually result in meaningful change.

I've worked in the industry myself, and you are correct. If you don't love making games, there's no reason to be a dev. It does not pay that great, and the amount of work is tremendous.



I meant that the management does not want to make it, most likely for the businessy/logistical reasons you stated.

Naoki Yoshida is in charge of CBU3. He sits on the board. He is 100% management, and if he thought a XI expansion/remake was viable in any way, it would absolutely be on a whiteboard somewhere.

It's not, and people really, really, need to push through bargaining, to acceptance.

To be clear, I'm not, like, happy about it, but XI is what it is, and it will continue to be that for the forseeable future. If we get a remake, it'll be after XIV starts to sunset and they need a new game.

The new content was also too difficult, and they didn't adjust it until it was too late. If you weren't stun botting you weren't winning.