They had a recent earnings call as well that was reported that their current games they been releasing outside of FF14 haven’t been doing well. I can’t remember the article that talked about it. They do have a long history releasing good games, but some also didn’t do so well. Like Marvel Avengers and Balan Wounderworld. Games like NieR Replicant did very well. I think Avengers was their big flop that they focused a lot of time and money on that Crystal Dynamics could have done a much better job with.
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Oh, you meant recently. Yeh, fair enough. I’ll give you that. My old dinosaur brain was just fondly remembering things like Deus Ex and older FF main games.
Mind you, I think FF7 Remake did pretty well, but other than that their single player games are super hit or miss. 
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Yeah. The point is. Square has their hits and misses to when it comes to games they publish and etc. They do have some greed behind them because the decisions they are making with games like Avengers. They also have mobile games that have gacha mechanics behind it. Hell, they have games that are exclusive only to Japan and never plan to release to the US.
So again, they aren’t a perfect company. They are doing very well with FF14 because their executives are basically trusting Yoshi P with the game because people are really enjoying it.
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Neither trailer was appealing. Neither showed anything that would have meaning to someone who wasn’t already familiar with the storylines. At least in the Shadowlands trailer, the overly loud generic fantasy music softened a little bit when there was dialogue so the listener didn’t have a hard time understanding what was being said. I would give both a failing grade for drawing in people who aren’t currently subscribed.
You play WoW.
The end.
Who said, I am playing wow?!
Take have a 
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He’s not wrong though.
I’m all for roasting Blizzard when they make the game feel like a chore, when the game is released bugged, or they make the questionable decision to censor things that have been fine for 17 years, but trailers is not something they’ve ever been bad at.
Heck the four covenant trailers they released in the lead up to Shadowlands were some of the best stuff they’ve released in a long while.
Hmm… interesting.
A video that looks more like a WoW raid launch video? 
FF14. Or just FF.
You know what’s funny?
People berate Blizzard being cheap with their cutscenes in BFA and SL (Not the pre-rendered ones, the ingame ones), criticizing their bad lip syncing and such. Meanwhile i’m watching a FF14 expansion launch video and by the 0:31 to 0:33, i’m seeing pretty bad lip syncing. Seriously.
Yet people who were critical at WoW on even something like that, aren’t with FF14 here. And FF14 animates their cutscenes and don’t use pre-existing ingame animations like WoW does.
"Consistency? What’s that? 
"
And FF14 has a bigger cash shop.
FF14 is still on DirectX11 and has Crystal Tools for it’s engine, which is pretty resource hungry, all the while made with consoles in mind.
It’s fairly common for games to put out cinematic trailers that are not using the game’s native graphics. It’s just meant to build hype, mostly. Blizzard’s cinematic trailers are typically LIKED, btw. It’s not like people expect the actual game to look like that.
The problem with FF14 is that it doesn’t generate a lot of income which is why it’s on such a low budget and limited amount of datacenters. SquareEnix just posted their earnings and despite the FF14 streamer pump they had a profit decrease in digital/subscription profits in Q3 2021 compared to Q3 2020 because they make most of their money off of games like Outriders, Nier Replictant, etc.
In the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) Game sub-segment, rose compared to the same period of the previous fiscal year due to sharp growth in the number of monthly paying subscribers for “FINAL FANTASY XIV.”
The Games for Smart Devices/PC Browser sub-segment saw net sales decline compared to the same period of the previous fiscal year, in part due to lackluster performances by existing titles. Net sales and operating income in the Digital Entertainment segment totaled ¥129,451 million (a decrease of 9.1％ from the same period of the prior fiscal year), and ¥29,499 million (a decrease of 12.8％ from the same period of the prior fiscal year), respectively.
SquareEnix owns a lot of things like arcades, publications, merchandise, amusement parks, etc. and they had a solid revenue increase on those.
I’m confused. What you quoted there seems to show that while the broader Browser/Smartphone app games division isn’t doing that well, FFXIV in particular was knocking it out of the park.
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Their limited Data Center point doesn’t make a long of sense either, as there are 8 spread across all the countries (3 in North America) with another opening up soon. For specific server could there are 60 total servers (24 for North America). That’s by no measure a small amount of servers. Specially since there’s often a queue to get in to most of em.
Granted WoW has MORE servers, but they keep having to link them together because of low population.
Blizzard is more resource efficient with how they utilize their servers because they have 100s of them. They were already connecting servers and utilizing phasing technology by the time WOTLK came out 13 years ago.
Blizzard can pull servers out their butt, but SquareEnix has been dragging their feet so when their expansion launches extremely long queue times are inevitable like the New World fiasco. It’ll be worse though since their servers have a smaller capacity. The issue is primarily money: not a CPU shortage. It was just more cost efficient for them to wait for the streamer surge to run its course than to add a bunch of new servers.