The Business: Respecting Your Players' Time Proves More Profitable In The Long Run

Game designers in the videogame world get increasing pressure from the bean counters and C Suite to turn their game into the sort of casino-style madhouse that World of Warcraft has become, and the incredible profitability of Pay To Win trash mobile games--all of which are even worse about this--just rachets up that pressure. Fortunately we have a counter-example in Final Fantasy XIV.

Remember what having your time respected feels like? That's 14's business model in a nutshell. Already the massive queue times are lessening as those who just play for the story are finishing their playthroughs and dipping out to do other things, making the less-populated servers return more-or-less to pre-expansion states and the really busy ones (like I'm on) come down from 6-8 hours having to babysit a queue to 2-3 hours where you can confidently tab out and be useful elsewhere while you wait.

As 14--and thus Square-Enix--profited greatly from this user-friendly model, and word spreads about how (unlike WOW) you have no Fear Of Missing Out going on (you can go back at any time and play through what you missed, and the Level Synch system ensures that you get the intended experience), you have solid evidence to shove in the faces of those same retarded rhesus monkeys when they screetch at you about Number Go Up!

MMOs in particular require the cultivation and maintainence of large user numbers over a long period of time. Embracing cyclical population number variation is the smarter play, and not invalidating past content offerings is another (both in not making it easy to skip it and not making only the most recent stuff relevant); 14 embraced the Long Tail model, and it is paying off big now for the team and the company. Players feel no guilt in not playing for months at a time, knowing they can just pick up where they left off and not be abandoned by all and sundry; now this is paying off handsomely and the usual mouthpieces are agape at this contravension of Mammon Mob antimorality.

Remember that when you go forward. This is another example where being the turtle is better than being the hare.