I will have to go with Prothescar's comment earlier and agree with it.
You have to look at it from a business standpoint. If I recall the survey that was done a year or two ago, I answered PC for the platform I play the majority of my games on including FFXI.
I know that Japanese players are still using the PS2, moreso than NA players and especially European players. It would be a waste of manufacturing expenses to stamp out discs for Playstation 2 users if the number of PS2 users in that market (North American being that market) hardly use the PS2 system to play FFXI on.
I can count on one hand the number of people I know of in FFXI that play on the PS2. And of those, I know that many of them moved from the PS2 to the PC because Sony stopped supporting the system whenever it broke down. Add to that fact that those that I knew that were on the PS2 had PS2-only glitches and problems. Those were completely eliminated when they moved to a PC.
Heck, one person I knew, her brother bought her a high end gaming desktop (think: Core i7, 500-series GPU system) just to play FFXI on. It was overkill but she liked the fact she didn't have to deal with the PS2 dying on her anymore.
Does this mean PS2 support is dropped? No. I hope someday it would but that's an entirely different discussion for some other time.
SE will continue to support it so long as Japanese players (not NA/EU) continue to play on the PS2 system in Japan.
As for the comment earlier in the thread that the PS2 is holding back the game. You have to remember that the "old guard," or the old team, on FFXI commented during an older Vanafest or E3 that they wanted to keep the PS2 and PC and 360 versions the same. It made development and updating easier. It's also why the PC version is a port of the PS2 and the 360 is a port of the PC version. Yet, they're still all using the same general codebase. It's not perfect but it works. Is it limiting the game? In a way, yes and no. Yes, because the graphics and textures will have to suit the PS2's limited memory and processor capabilities. No, because now the Windows version is getting some dedicated features such as improved fonts and improved UI. Those are things that the old team didn't want to do or even want to consider doing. It'd take another great amount of persuasion to give the Windows and 360 versions dedicated higher resolution textures. And, yes, that can be supported within the current engine. You can look at the higher resolution modded DAT files from several years ago. It's possible, but the team currently working on FFXI will have to consider whether it's worth the manpower and time to do that-- an entire re-texture of the 360 and PC versions.
It would take an entire rewrite of the code to be made for the PC and 360 (development tools are similar between the two) so it'd run better on both systems. And if they wanted to, an entirely new set of code for a PS3 version because they don't use the same SDK. And, again, from a business standpoint, that's not financially feasible given all the projects Square-Enix is budgeted for at this time. And, SE has already stated that they didn't want to spend the time doing that because it could be better spent making another game. I'm still not sure if there is still a 50/50 split on development teams between XI and XIV, but I'm sure they've been increased-- one for Aldoulin and the other for XIV 2.0.
It's all about where the dollar goes. It wouldn't make sense to market and spend the distribution costs of ice cream sandwiches in Antarctica when you could make more money selling, distributing it and marketing it in a place like Australia.
Think with logic, it helps at times. (Unless there are plot holes or glaring, gaping omissions that defy logic.)
