Fujito 4gamer Interview

Control is never in the hands of the creators when they're under someone else's contract. When you're on the hook to investors or shareholders, your priority and deadlines align with theirs or your project doesn't get funded. This is why I don't understand the hate for Fujito. It's not like he ever had a say in any matter of consequence.




Probably not popular opinion, but I liked Abyssea. Reisenjima is basically abyssea lite and is still current so it wouldn't make sense to threevive it. There are still a few mentions that haven't received the ilvl treatment I'd rather see before that.

Most of us were still enjoying the game by then, it wasn't really until the horrible anniversary that most started to notice how they were treating the game.

While XI isn't candy crush level of popularity, it def had an impact and that guy is always angry so just ignore him. A lot of people know who Shantotto is but popularity doesn't always determine a games impact or worth. There are plenty of cult classic movies, games and pieces of art that inspired and are loved by many. Also, plenty of people want to play older games as I see it being done daily. Nostalgia is hard to beat and most older games were better than most of the crap put out nowdays anyway.

Just imagine only valuing things that are popular by the brain dead masses...Candy crush, Fornite, they should be placed in museums for being so inspiring and beautiful, no other game should be created because that is the pinnacle of gaming right there.

I'd never hire someone who manages a business down and makes excuses. Business is about taking the worst they throw at you and turning it into a success.

I'm perfectly aware that this may have been the case 15+ years ago. However, the game being in maintenance mode implies that development costs are either extremely minimal or completely gone. I haven't seen marketing for the game in over a decade, and there's no way there are more than maybe a handful of GMs if that, anyone who has played on Asura can attest to this. So while there are definitely costs associated with operating at scale, I am comfortable saying there is no way that their subscription fees can't cover the minimal cost. And some of those things aren't even directly tied to XI in any way so using them as an arguing point is a bit of a reach. (They're a large company, they're going to have HR/law/admins/network engineers regardless of whether or not they're hosting XI.)

As for the hosted service, there's almost no reality where Square is spending very much on it. I'm not exaggerating when I tell that most modern cell phones are capable of hosting a Final Fantasy XI server. I wouldn't be surprised if they're still using the same hardware they've been using since 2002. Letting a server sit in a server stack and spin its wheels basically just costs whatever electricity it consumes, which is negligible at best. I wouldn't even be shocked if its in the same datacenter as XIV's Japanese servers.

Again, I am aware. That's why I did my math at HALF of their price point, this leaves more than enough room for middle men in payment processing to take their cuts.

I did my math based solely on metrics of the server I ran, which had a fraction of the playerbase that current retail does. I was extremely generous to them when I came to the math I did. At the time of my post there are 2,363 players online on Asura. So even if they're only making $4 off of every person on Asura right this second, (and if their middlemen are screwing them this hard, they're not a very good business) that's still an income of $9,452 a month, or just shy of $113,500 a year. And this assumes that those 2,350 players are the only one with active subscriptions, it doesn't even include people who are offline or on other servers.

So yeah, I think we're A-OK.

Yeah, that's soulless corporate talk. I want to hear "these players have been with us for so long we have decided to show our gratitude and give them an awesome 20 year anniversary."

Are you defending him for defending shareholder's interest, not ours as players? At least he is getting paid to do so, what about you?

I wonder if its not just somewhere in the between? I don't think he's necessarily shilling for the company, it sorta just read more like "I don't really know what I'm doing in this position and Matsui didn't leave me with much direction."

That could just be me though.

Sure is a good thing you'll never own a business then isn't it.

RoV was the gratitude.

Oh, I do believe that FFXI is still profitable of course. If it's not then they'll shut it down or enter real maintenance mode already. I just don't think the exact number can be estimated easily unless you are well versed with Japanese employees salary range in this industry.


just because SE isn't adding too much content doesn't mean they aren't spending money on it. In Japanese workplace there is a system called Life Time Commitment, if a company hires an employee they'll have to keep them until they retire.

As these employee gets more senior their salary increase too. But SE still have to keep them, and assign them to a project somewhere, and pay them senior employee's salary. Even if these senior do minimum level of work on a project, or super easy tasks that an entry-level employee can do, they are still getting senior employee's salary.

In other words, it's going to be difficult to estimate real spending of this project unless you see the internal financial statement with employee salary info available. speculations solely based on one's individual work experience won't be all that accurate IMO.



That's bad English from my part. I think the correct word is PR, so people who post on social media and community rep who collect player's feedback and report it. They still get paid.


In this case the time that they spend on XI related tasks count as XI's maintenance budget and time that they spend on other project doesn't. They aren't free as long as they spend at least a little bit of work hour on XI.

I wonder if Fujito's pretty negative interview has anything to do with a terrible operating profit and stock price falling this year. The sales results of another game didn't end as well as S-E hoped, so maybe they are searching to make some savings on the old game where they still make a profit without doing anything?

@afina

just FYI, as someone that has worked with japanese tech adjacent folks they get paid on average less than people here do by a substantial amount so i'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

the really weird obsession with the japanese culture and workforce when mostly garbage has come out of it for the last 20 years is really amazing. can't you move on to a south korean obsession? it's far more trendy

to the above posters point, these problems with SE employees are likely why the stock price/games keep failing. all you're describing is a lazy as *** employee, not some cultural pinnacle.

also this hemorrhaging is probably why they are trying to get back to partnering with the big dogs https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/07/29/microsofts-surprise-final-fantasy-announcement-flips-a-narrative-on-its-head/?sh=fcf78146315b

We just have to buyout FFXI from square

Where do you read that there is an obsession with Japanese work culture LOL. I said nothing about it being good or bad. I only said that's how work culture can be there and it may potentially affect the budget. How the hell did you read information or speculation as obsession? They are totally different.

Also LOL if you think South Korean work culture is going to be any different and worth obsess with. If there is a "Employee happiness ranking list", South Korean and Japan both will probably take the last 5 spots, if not last 3.


I searched this page and found the term "cultural pinnacle" is used exactly once by you, not by me.

I don't think anyone is arguing that XI is unprofitable. It's a question of priorities.

If SE was a small company and XI was their only game, we'd probably see ongoing development, perpetual expansions, backend/engine updates, the works. They might work on other projects, but XI would be their main priority as that's what pays the bills.

SE has other priorities; Even if you assume all 71k active characters tracked by /database are individual subs with all the wardrobes, XI's profit still only amounts to a rounding error compared to the mountain of cash SE makes from XIV subs, much less those sweet ducats from the XIV cash shop. Even single player games usually pass XI's total 20-year sales number within their first year of release. Popular games like VII Remake did it in weeks. SE allows XI to exist, but it is no longer and never again will be a priority for the company.

Agree with Meeble's take. The game is being maintained because it makes a profit, technically, but even if they poured resources into it, it would never make the kind of profit their other ventures do. Companies have limited resources and have to allocate them to the project which will return the highest profit, and frankly I think dumping mass amounts of development, server, and advertising into trying to revitalize an old school MMO is a fool's errand.

That said, I wish they'd do it. I'd love to have more new content and a fresh influx of players to buy all my ***. Ahem I mean to play with.

I'm with you on most of this, except:


A fully loaded (all mules, all wardrobes) account is just under $40/month. All 70k users having that would be a little under $35m/year. SE's net profit for the fiscal year ending in March 2023 was just north of $300m. Given what XI must cost to run at this point in its lifecycle, XI subs are almost pure profit, and getting almost 10% of your profit from one item is never a rounding error.

All that said, if I had to guess, I would bet XI's operating costs are under $2m/year and its gross income somewhere around $10m. It's still an excellent piece of ROI for the company, but that ROI is primarily based on how little of the I piece of that equation they're actually doing. There's no indication that putting any more investment into it is going to boost sales, so it's really only a question of retention. FWIW I think they overestimate how long people are going to stick around, but given how long people have tolerated its slow decline, you can't really blame them for thinking the low-cost golden goose is just going to keep laying eggs forever.

One other quibble:


FF7R did pass it in weeks, but 7R also doesn't carry a sub. There's a good reason XIV only passed XI in "lifetime profit" within the last couple of years.

To add to what Idiot Boy said: Final Fantasy 11 players will naturally look into new FF titles, since it's associated with what they are playing.

Having a customer base is not just about that one product that you sold, that one time. Loyal customer is far more important to the company than the guy who tips big, but never returns.

Fromsoftware understood that. They still make games for their loyal fan-base. From DS1 to Elden Ring, you feel like they didn't sell themselves to the younger Tik Tok generation. If you make the same comparison between FF9 to FF16 you will notice what went wrong with SE. One won the GOTY, the other is bleeding.

Companies have lost their way. (even more)

Every big under-performance is met with "the fans are the problem"

We make what we want to make and the consumers god damn well better consume it.

This comment is really not fair.

1) Elden ring actually did change for different group of players. Many hardcore DS fans that I know of don't even rank it as their favorite Souls game. But ER eventually got more players than any of the previous DS games precisely because it's more approachable than before.

So it isn't fair to say Souls game never change for a bigger playerbase. They did.

Edit: the same can be said for Assassin's creed, God of war, Yazuka , Atelier series etc....They all changed genre before. FF isn't the only one. Direction change is super common in the industry.

2) There are plenty of loyal FF fans who support the direction change. I am one of them. If you look hard enough you should find more people like me. There is no need to pretend people like us don't exist.

3) FF9 never won any goty nor any relevant awards to my knowledge. You can find the list here. FF9 literally won zero award in all the lists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_the_Year_awards

Even the sales was far worse than FF7 and 8. It was only being praised by small group of vocal people (relatively small in the FF community) who enjoyed this art style more than Nomura's.

I would also point out that SE currently doesn't have the ability to make a GOTY game. Even Yoshi P admitted it, he said SE is currently behind western AAA studios.

So even if they don't change direction it probably won't be goty anyways.

I would rather enjoy FF for what it is instead of expecting it to meet certain criteria set by someone else.

Ho yay at 30 euros / month ff11 isn't a priority any more .....

While I agree that Final Fantasy Versus IX is pissing the legacy player base off, it's still going to make a profit. The next iteration will likely be Final Fantasy Versus X painted with a different name.

FF & SE are on their way out, it's been in a decline for quite some time.

this is unfortunate for those of us that play ffxi and i wish there was something that could be done for ffxi, but it will be good for gaming in the long run.

really though white knights for SE regarding ffxi are the reason we are in the state we're in now, people accepted next to nothing for such a long time while paying the same sub (or more in the case of wardrobes or mules.)

to avoid the argument "BUT MUH INFLATION" i'm talking about the dollar amount that represents the industry standard. WoW was $13 in 2004 and it's $13 now, same with ffxi. the difference is one got worked on and one didn't.

In related news, if you've ever wanted to be an SE shareholder, today is the day. Share price continued to crash after that earnings call, which is a little funny, given that the thrust of it was two things that everyone here knows:

- XIV profits during expac off-years are nothing special
- Nobody has a PS5

I mean... The whole we're gonna go balls deep into NFTs and crypto and pretending things are rpgs doesn't really inspire investors.

On top of the Avengers failure and the Forspoken failure and selling the entire western division

Square is not where it's at, even on discount. BUT! It's never too late to fire the *** and right the failboat.

SE: Screw the players that's been with us for decades. We need to Fortnite-DMC our product to attract the newer generation.


Share price starts to bleed

SE:

SE's newest earning report explained the reason behind earning decrease. The HD game department (single player games) sales actually increased thanks to Pixel remaster and FF16. But MMO department and mobile department suffered from decline.

According to SE their new DQ mobile game has weak performance. And MMO department also suffered from decline due to the lack of new FF14 expansion this year. FF14 had very strong performance after endwalker release last year, so the baseline for comparison is probably much higher this year.

I also love how some of the online article choose not to mention this info from the report, so they can frame the earning decrease narrative however they want.

If you look at the stock price on Google, it was 5190 JPY in 2022 April, 5457 now. So it simply went back to where it was one year ago.

I don't think the stock price drop is because of nft nor selling western studios. Stock price actually increased after western studio sold and nft is not a huge investment atm. from what I've seen SE still heavily rely on console games and MMO to make money atm. You'll have to wait for next FF14 expansion and FF7 rebirth in 2024 to see their earning increase again.

Ehh, not really. The biggest change to the Souls formula that Elden Ring did was expanding the world. Due to its large and open world, there's a lot of repetition that isn't present in other Souls games, and the folks who don't like it as much are generally folks who want a tighter game with more linearity. It's a very small amount of Souls fans who don't rank it up there in their top 3 or favorite.

But this idea is basically a non-starter too. Fromsoftware also makes Armored Core, and is very open to doing whatever they want with their games (Sekiro).

It's just that with the Souls series, it got so popular for Youtubers and Streamers that sheer influence peddling made it popular to an outlandish degree before it even came out.

There are droves and droves of Soulstubers, Youtubers who have made entire careers out of commenting on or providing videos of the game, challenge runs of the game, item descriptions and lore deep dives, the programming behind mechanics, the bugs in the programming, and basically every iota of anything you can do with those games.

A lot of them actually started their channels around the time Dark Souls 2 came out, though some were around earlier than that.

A lot of these channels have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and they range from being as simple as PVP montages or raw challenge run footage to being in depth, highly edited feature length videos.

And these types of youtuber succeed because the games really lend themselves to the players. It's interesting to watch, because it's hard to do well, and then there's more intrigue there to really build on for creative writers (or hell, anyone with a mildly soothing voice willing to read item descriptions and the wax lyrical about their relation to the game).

Games series that existed before this had plenty to ponder and wonder about, but few games do the same things as the Souls series while also coming out alongside the advent of video/stream hosting websites that generate profit for users.

By comparison, games like Final Fantasy have canon events that are displayed through cutscenes which the players can't really question or have really long in the tooth theories on. Coincidentally, a lot of gamers who love the Souls series in these Youtube circles are largely not Final Fantasy fans, with a surprising amount of disdain for Final Fantasy actually be verbalized within their channels' contents over the years.

Anyway, before I ramble on this tangent too much longer, the point I'm getting at in response to you and Godfry is that these games' success and failure have far less to do with their quality as games and far more to do with how the public perceives them. Games these days live and die by the guillotine of online presence and coverage. Influencers/Youtubers etc. have the power these days to grow and shrink and stymie the reception to games(and there's further talks to be had on the associated content feedback loop, where when a new Souls game comes out, that means new content for those channels, so there's an even bigger reason to rate the games more highly as they extend into multiple forms of entertainment now).

Lots of stuff is being discounted across the market, past two years have been buying season for me.

IKR?!?

they're down 10% over the last 5 years.

the dow is up 37% so it underperformed the market by 47%. the only bump it had was asmondgold and covid. it's on it's way out, sorry homie.