If Horizon Had A $1 Monthly Fee

the best part is, it wouldn't even be your fault. you just happened to be there, man! HNM spawn autoclaimed now, so it's just a game of stacking a bunch of AFK bodies out at camps. sick stuff, so fun

i mean this tracks. we already knew it happened on wings, and some of those wings staff would go on to make horizon.

then those same folks use advance knowledge of custom exp camps to rush their staff-and-friends statics to 75 for server firsts in their respective jobs, plus exploit 'quirks' in crafting recipes strangely specific to horizon- which aerec and others already knew to make a beeline for to pl their crafts to server first 100s while making bank (extra cool that aerec couldn't help but brag about how much he was profiting)

and when he got caught and called out on it, he promised to roll back crafting progress for himself and anyone else that used that exploit, but never did. just quietly pulled up the ladder so nobody else could use it after. pulling the ladder up seems to be their go-to method in general

even ignoring how pathetic it looks for staff to try one-upping their own players for bragging rights, it seems suspiciously like a thinly-veiled attempt to beat the competition everywhere to ensure they could lock down markets and sell that gil :)

and that's just the tip of the horizon iceberg. place fully banks on the average nostalgia jockey to go in with blinders on like "i'm just grateful to be able relive what it's like to exp in yuhtunga jungle as a NIN/THF, and farm beehive chips to pay for shihei i won't use. none of that other stuff affects me so idc, man"

Youre lying
I was told by a horizon stan, or dev, whatever, that the private server being free was an absolute non-factor.

Why is this thread still open?

Containment

*giggle*

yeah, retail costing what it does is a shame and honestly an absolute crime. the people that argue that it should still cost what it does want the game to die. a lower barrier/cost for entry would almost definitely attract people who otherwise would not be willing to try.

no FTEs, "end of life" and still full price if not more.

greedy shitty company that people have trouble calling out for some reason.

fwiw i've been saying they should re-add ffxi subs into a bundle with ffxiv for ages now. it would only help either/both game and kinda feels like spite or pride keeping them from doing it again at this point

This suggestion comes up all the time but there are two options:

Charge extra for FFXIV sub to make up for the loss of FFXI sub revenue. This screws over all FFXIV players who are now paying more for a game they previously got for a lower sub

Charge the same for FFXIV but give FFXI free. This throws away all FFXI revenue and the benefit is...I have no idea. If FFXIV players start playing FFXI, you don't make any more money because they're still paying the same. If FFXI players start playing FFXIV, you still don't make any more money because they're still only paying a single (lower) sub.

Still not sure why this would make any business sense. I guess it would improve FFXI player counts and maybe FFXIV player counts, but it would lose them money either way.

I guess they could make it so you get a % off for buying both subs but once again...why? They are just taking a loss on one/both games by doing this, except maybe if it encourages players to buy extra subs, maybe?

the last paragraph you edited in yes, that's the main reason to do that. there would likely be no noticeable drop in revenue and it's also the right thing to do. if anything it would increase from people on ff14 wanting to try ffxi or vice versa.

the revenue FFXI gives them means next to nothing. sorry to burst your big business brain. it likely does not even get a line item on the most detailed of financial reports.

i don't think you have to charge more for either or give either away for free. you'd just provide a package discount for both, like bundling your phone and internet. you make more that way than if people only sub to one or the other- and let's be real, the number of people who sub to both at once at full price is typically very very small

Wow makes tons of money off of cash store mounts. Ffxiv offers such things too and cosmetics. If ffxi players are suspected to buy such cosmetics, it might be worth it to them.

OK so let me get this straight, since I'm not a math whiz like you.

FFXI subs are such a miniscule amount of money that they can't be bothered to even track it.

So the plan is to make more money, by leveraging the tiniest part of their business that they aren't even reporting on?

Let's say they have 10,000 FFXI players and 2,000,000 FFXIV players, and 1,000 of them are crossover.

You give a discount to 1,000 people and then best-possible-scenario increase FFXIV subs by .5%, or you can increase the "so tiny we don't bother to track it" part of your business. BRILLIANT! Why didn't the dumbass suits at SE think of this? They should hire you as a consultant.

Why are there only two options, two very very extreme options??

Third option:
Single FFXIV Sub: 12.99-14.99/month depending on subscription length
Single FFXI Sub: 12.95
If bundled: 6.49/month for XI sub (half off)

there's only 2 options because that's what works best for his argument

Player counts are a core part of game survivability. A short term monetary loss from the crossovers could theoretically make itself back over time from FFXIV players playing XI and XI holdouts giving in to trying FFXIV. But, there's also the value in having more people online, because that stops other people leaving and potentially causes them to maintain subs that aren't even effected by the program for longer.

This is always such a ridiculous extreme statement that is not rooted in reality. COMPANIES TRACK THEIR COSTS AND EARNINGS FROM EVERYHTING!

Anecdotal example from my own company:
We make resistors and we have these little bits of metal that we attach to them, these bits of metal are valued at about a penny (0.01 USD). We use literally millions of these parts a year, but the bean counters in accounting will not let us make this a "bulk" part (meaning we would not need to track every single one used), as a result we constantly have to make adjustments to the our inventory system for pennies of scrapped parts (lead attach machines sometime get misaligned and eat up like a feet of the reel of parts)

A second anecdotal example:
Some our resistors get gold added in an electrolysis gold plating, which has "GOLD" in it and we have to constantly get a weight to tell the bean counters how much of this valuable gold is still in the bath... mind you it is bonded to cyanide and if someone wanted to make off with it they would have a very bad time.

no one at the C level at SE thinks about or knows what FFXI is.

is there a PM somewhere with an excel sheet? yeah. that's not what i meant and if you think that's what i meant you're being willfully obtuse

no one that matters knows what the revenue of this game is at SE.

arguing semantics around this is incredibly cringe.

it'd be super simple to prove me wrong. find the last earnings report where FINAL FANTASY XI is called out specifically. not this game unit 3 ***. specifically "FFXI". probably adoulin release would be your best bet?

If they bundled the subs, even at something small like a 10% discount, but gave XIV players an extra free aetheryte destination or extra retainer slot for bundling, XI would double or triple its revenue.

Even that might be underselling it, honestly

I will use an uno reverse card you go do the opposite it, as by your logic it should be even easier :D

(also if that report does not explicitly state the income from XIV then your point is pretty flawed, cuz I think we can all agree they are tracking those earnings)

Bring back the $7 XI sub

In case my point earlier wasn't crystal clear:

You can't have your cake and eat it too. If FFXI revenue is so irrelevant nobody cares about it, then tripling that irrelevant revenue is still irrelevant. If FFXI subs are irrelevant, adding 100% of them to FFXIV subs will make an irrelevant difference.

You can't on one hand say that FFXI numbers are pathetic and unimportant and also say that bundling them with FFXIV would make some appreciable difference to either.

I'm sure it would be the "right thing to do" from a warm fuzzies perspective, to give a nod to the hardcore FFXI players and help them out by infusing it with more players, but people arguing it from a business/profit perspective have...questionable math skills.

I like the idea of giving a FFXIV item/unlock/thingy for having a FFXI sub, that could be interesting. Even better if they could tie it to some "achievement" in FFXI, though that would be considerably more difficult to implement.

Your assessment of what would happen if a discount bundle were to be reimplemented is logically flawed. You're ignoring several variables to suit your argument. Last time they had the discount bundle it wasn't automatic, it was elective. It only worked if you subbed for both games on the same SE account.

Pros:
-Potential to get XIV players who currently aren't subscribed to subscribe to the game. That's hundreds of thousands to millions of potential new sign-ups. Even assuming only 5 or 10% of these people try it, that's still likely a larger number of new individual subscribers than XI currently has. This would be $7 more per person than they were making before.

-Returnees who are put off by the current sub fee coming back. As someone who plays both, I've heard countless times a sentence such as, "If XI didn't cost more than my XIV sub I'd go back to *** around". This would be $7 more per person than they were making before.

-Slight chance of some XI players subbing to XIV now that they get an XI discount. This would be $5-10 more per person than they were making before.

-Existing XI diehards would still pay the full price. Some people will never try XIV so their 12.95 will never change.

-they'd still make loads of extra money off of wardrobes, dollar mules, transfers, etc.


Cons:
-Some small percentage of current players such as myself would get 6-7$ taken off of their monthly XI sub. Truly game ending stuff. I'm sure all 5 of us are keeping the game afloat. This would be $6-7 less than they were making before.

I'm not trying to imply that they'd lose money by doing this, my point is that they'd be implementing all this nonsense for a tiny increase in revenue on either side.

Inb4: it's really simple to implement!

What happens if someone subscribes or un-subscribes from one or the other mid-month? What if you have 10 FFXI accounts associated with a single SE account, do they all get the discount for a single FFXIV account, or is it applied on a one-to-one basis? Who decides which FFXI account gets the discount, customer or SE? How are chargebacks/refunds handled? Can the discount be re-applied in the same month if they re-subscribe to the other game?

You do know the XI/XIV bundle existed at one point, right?

I didn't realize that, I've never played both at the same time and hardly played FFXIV at all.

Guess that proves it then, they tried it, ran the numbers and figured out that it didn't make a profit. Guess a bunch of keyboard warriors with no data probably don't know more than them.

And once again, you jump to conclusions knowing nothing.

The bundle was during the absolutely putrid XIV launch in 2010. It was also a very limited time bundle, not that it being very limited mattered because XIV wound up being free to play for 3 years.

Nonetheless, the previously existing bundle already answered your 8 million questions.

Altana knows I need an eleventh retainer. Imagine the marketing synergy!

Bundle XI for an 11th retainer slot!

First of all, you're being excessively cringe. You don't have access to any more data than we do. It's very easy to say "lmao they tried it and it wasn't profitable", almost as easy as it is to say they had it set up as a promo when XIV first launched to push XI players to sub to XIV and, spoilers, it worked. Keeping it around could've made less sense then since XI wasn't bleeding subs yet. Nowadays XI could very easily see an increase in revenue from this kind of thing compared to when it had equal or more subs than XIV.