I know that the Final Fantasy series has become quite the punchline in recent years, but in following along the buildup to the relaunch of Final Fantasy XIV, producer/director Naoki Yoshida has appeared to be that breath of fresh air that a company like Square Enix is in desperate need of. A guy who is brutally honest, and actually pays attention to potential customers/fans, as well as the gaming climate around him.

So, in this era of every other MMO under the sun going from subscription model to free to play soon afterwards, he has remained steadfast in his commitment to keeping FFXIV: A Realm Reborn as a subscription based game. In an interview with Venture Beat, he gave a particularly in-depth answer as to why they are taking this course, as well as commenting about other games in the genre.

Naoki Yoshida: There are many different types of MMOs. There are two big types or groups that we see. You have one group with games like your Rift or your Star Wars, which are very large-scale MMOs with established IP. Then you have your smaller MMOs, which are maybe new IPs that don’t need as big a user base to be successful. So we can start off with the big group, the large-scale MMO group, with your Rift, your Star Wars, your Guild Wars, your Age of Conan and The Lord of the Rings. These games all started out on a subscription model, or were planning for a subscription model when they were in development. Then, partway through, they switched to free-to-play.

Then again, you have games like Rift and Star Wars. Even though people have been saying that yes, there is this change in the market, everything’s moving to free-to-play, they still – up until recently – were developing a system that would be subscription-based. Even though everyone is saying the industry is going free-to-play, they still were developing these huge games with subscriptions in mind. Again, we’re not saying that one is better than the other, that free-to-play is better than subscription or subscription is better than free-to-play. But for a large game on that scale, what’s most important – more important than making a lot of money – is making a stable income, a stable amount of money over a long period of time. And so to develop a large-scale MMO like this, you need to spend a lot of time with a lot of resources and a lot of staff to make this game.

To do that, you need a lot of money, and to get a lot of money to do that, you usually need investors to invest in your game. Because you’ve spent a lot of money on getting this game ready and borrowed a lot of money from these investors, when you release the game, the investors expect to see returns. If your game gets a lot of users and a lot of subscriptions right away, your investors will be happy and you can pay them. But what happens if you don’t hit that number right away? You have a bunch of staff members waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of investors waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of contents that needs to get made because you have to have updates, but you can’t do it because you don’t have enough money, because you didn’t hit that number you were aiming for. And so what do you have to do? One option to get instant money is free-to-play, or selling these items. To get that money so you can pay off your staff, pay off your investors, and start making new content, switching to free-to-play, selling items, and using that money is one way to do it.

So why didn’t Rift or EA with Star Wars do this from the beginning? Why didn’t they start with free-to-play? There’s a reason behind that. With free-to-play, because you’re selling these items, you’ll have months where you sell a bunch of stuff and you make a lot of money in that one month. But it’s all about what happens during that month. Next month, the person who maybe bought $100 worth of items in the last month could purchase nothing at all. You don’t know what you’re going to be getting, and because you don’t know what you’re going to be getting, you can’t plan ahead. You don’t know how much money is coming in. If you can’t plan ahead, then you can’t keep staff, because you don’t know if you’ll have enough money to pay the staff next month.

With a subscription base, if you get maybe 400,000 members, you know that you’re going to have the money from that monthly subscription for the next month. You also know that you’re going to have 400,000 this month, and it’s not going to go down to 200,000 users next month. That type of jump really doesn’t happen with a subscription model. So you know that you’re going to have a steady income. Because you have a steady income, you can plan ahead further. You can make sure you have staff members to create that new content. By creating new content, you’re making the players happy. If they know this game is going to keep creating new content, they’ll continue to pay their monthly subscription fees. So rather than going for the huge $100-million-a-month hit that you might get with the free-to-play model, having that steady income allows us to provide a better product to the players.

Now, you have Blizzard and you have Square Enix. We’re the only two companies in the industry, basically, that are making MMOs with our own money. That gives us an advantage, because where other companies have to get money from investors and have to pay that back, we don’t have a lot of time to build slowly and be able to pay that back. Investors want their returns right away. With Square Enix and Blizzard, because we’re putting our own money into it, we don’t have those investors to worry about, and that means we can release something and maybe take a little bit of a hit at the beginning, but as long as we’re increasing the amount of people we have, then we’ll get that money and make the players happy. We’ll get into that cycle I talked about before, where we’re creating good content and have that steady income to keep the cycle going.

With version 1.0, even though we call it a failure, we still had a user base. During the time that we were developing this game, 2.0, we were able to increase the amount of subscribers threefold as well. Again, it takes time. It takes showing the users that we’re really into this and giving them that new content. But we’re able to see a rise there. That’s what we’re looking for in this. Again, we’re not saying—The market didn’t change. It’s that there are two different types of models. Choosing the model that’s right for your product and being successful with that is what’s important. We believe that the bigger the game, the larger the scale of the MMO, it’s going to be better for the game if it’s on a subscription model.

That’s why you see a lot of companies that chose the subscription model, that wanted to do what we were doing, but were forced to free-to-play. They didn’t go to free-to-play by choice, because if that was the case, they would have gone free-to-play at the beginning. They’d develop it for free-to-play, not full subscription, instead of being forced to go free-to-play. We hear a lot of people saying, “Star Wars is free-to-play now, it’s great!” But then you ask them if they’re playing free-to-play Star Wars and they say, “No, not really playing it.” Everyone talks about how great it is that it went free-to-play, but then you ask around and really, there aren’t that many people who are playing it since it’s gone free-to-play. If you spend all that money on a game ,release it, and it’s filled with bugs and you don’t have enough time to do your updates, people will leave. Players need that new content. Not being able to provide it is fatal. If they were able to produce as much content as players wanted, then people would have stayed there. We don’t really believe it’s a problem with the business model. It’s how that’s handled.

Credit Venture Beat

It's quite an insight into how Yoshida thinks, and I wonder what others think of this, very thought out answer on what is basically the state of MMOs nowadays?

This guy seems more level headed and on the ball than any other person at Square Enix right now.

Well I love the beta. I was not a part of 1.0 beta so I have no idea how much it has improve but I can safely say this is by far my favorite MMO I have played to date. And I have played a lot, Tera, Aion, Rift, Neverwinter, LotR, Rusty hearts, C9, DCU and SwtoR. (I travel a lot for work, lots of time)

Lovely music, graphics, dynamic event like GW2 and engaging combat. I never thought I would go back into MMO after wow but I might for this. Whatever he is doing, keep doing it.

It has improved a ton. Actually you can say it is a totally different game now. I have been there since Alpha of Version 1.0 and we argued a lot but the former director and the staff did not listen at all to us. Now they finally do and you see a huge improvement. The only thing that bothers me right now are all these new Beta testers who come in and say that they want an action based battlesystem like Tera.....

But yeah it is a great MMO now and I hope the media and players give it another chance it totally deserves it now.

Agreed. It appears to be because he has accepted that he can make mistakes, and he is willing to acknowledge and then attempt to improve from them.

It'll be interesting to watch how this plays out. I played 1.0, thought it was pretty shit, and dabbled in Phase One of the beta. (which was fine)

If it turns out to be actually good, I'll consider it for the PS4. But after a quick look at the beta forums, it appears that many people are now finally happy with the direction this game is taking.

I'll play it when it comes out since I'm a ... something member. They put my name in the credits, so I'll see how much it's changed.

It's true what he says, in case of Old Republic the free to play system they have is horrendous in my opinion. Stopped playing it the moment "As a non-payer you aren't getting this loot, please pay to unlock."

There was a pretty dramatic change when Yoshida came in to take over on the game, from messaging and the changes its all been a really positive turn for the game, ill be excited to play once it fully comes out since the beta weekends are pretty short and nothing being saved yet for release progress, it wont be a big big thing that will get super numbers since i don't really see anything unique about the game other than its a Final Fantasy mmo, its pretty standard for a mmo,so i wonder how long they could keep it sub based or if they would just be ok having a steady stream like they had for XI since the actual fan base for that and this is the really dedicated type of people playing it.

I think thats part of the problem when companies try to convert from the sub model to F2P. It always comes out feeling awkward compared to something that was built to be F2P from the get go.

Also this quote from the story rubs me the wrong way.

With version 1.0, even though we call it a failure, we still had a user base. During the time that we were developing this game, 2.0, we were able to increase the amount of subscribers threefold as well.

Hey guys we made a shitty product and we are fully aware that it's terrible but that didn't stop us from swindling more money from people and suckering more people into subscribing to our terrible game.

Anyway he didn't sell me on why it needs to be subscription based. Hope his game does well but I wont be playing it. I think the sub model is archaic. Maybe I'll try it out for a month when I can get a copy for like 10 bucks and a free month of service.

I think you misunderstood him. He explained that increase in the next sentence.

During the time that we were developing this game, 2.0, we were able to increase the amount of subscribers threefold as well. Again, it takes time. It takes showing the users that we’re really into this and giving them that new content.

He isn't suggesting pride in swindling people. He's suggesting that they have kept improving it and adding new content, thus causing the amount of subscribers to increase over time. His point is that showing real investment in the game and giving people reason to keep coming back is the best way to get more subscribers. They improved the game and continued to see improvement in their subscriptions.

For once it is very story driven. Also you can combine yur skills and abilities from your other classes you leveled. For example if you leveled your conjurer to level 3 or 4 many other classes you will play has a heal spell. For example a Gladiator can get a heal spell and become more like a Paladin. That is really great that you only need to level one character to play all classes.

As for constantly. Phase 4 will be more of a stress test and servers will be on for several days. Also at this point you gonna keep your progression if everything goes right. Furthermore there will be a open beta shortly before the release so everyone can check this great game out.

The thing he gets at (and something i agree with 100%) is that when you have an mmo coming out that is created as a free to play game and has that in mind, the game will generally be fine, Neverwinter is a good example of a game that regardless of your thoughts on its actual gameplay, is designed in such a way that if you have more money than time you can buy the stuff you need, but if you have more time than money you can grind away and still get the same stuff. Unfortuantely when a game starts off with a subscription model and tries to go free to play it can end badly, some games have done it well (Tera, DC Universe Online, Star Trek etc) and others have been really poor at it (The Old Republic, Aion etc) so it makes sense that he would want to keep the current model as it is so they dont have to start walling off random content.

So i played during the alpha and beta tests of the game it was before, and the game it has now become and the difference is like night and day, there has been a small hit on the graphical fidelity but the amount of content is staggering and a trade off i for one am perfectly happy with. The game that it has become is really high quality, it looks and sounds great and it plays like a nicer looking more advanced version of Final Fantasy XI. I personally dont mind paying for a good quality experiance, i think Eve is totally worth the money, i also believed at one point that FFXI was and a lot of the free to play games like Tera or STO i drop money on occassion, but with FFXIV you do get a great consistant world, a well told story and a unique experiance. You also guarantee future expansions and updates which free to play games cant, they can try and work with whatever cash comes in from microtransactions but for myself, i played through all of TOR's story content and was satisfied with the ending, i dont feel the need to come back so i wont pay for extra stuff and a lot of players feel that way.

The original FF14 kept going for like two years while they worked on 2.0, so yeah I do take that as taking pride in growing subscribers for a shitty game.

EDIT: After looking stuff up I see that they ended up not charging the monthly fee until 2012 because of how bad the game was. Well that certainly explains how they expanded their "subscriber" base threefold. Easy to do that when the cost is zero dollars. hmmm.

Anyway that line just bugged me. Oh well.

@devilzrule27: yeah it increased while it was free, but it kept increasing after they turned the pay wall back on, because players saw the improvements and were at least willing to see the direction it was going from there

@devilzrule27: I was one of those people who came along after the pay wall went up. As I said in the OP, I followed along with the game as an outsider when the whole team restructure happened, and the announcement of what was then dubbed "Version 2.0". I liked what I saw was coming, but I also saw the improvements they had made to the original game client, and it impressed me enough to give them my money and play. The game that went down in November 2012 barely resembled the total disaster that it was at launch. It was playable, had some fun contents, and showed promise. It was still on a server system and game engine that were terrible, but they did all they could to get what they did out of it.

When they announced that the free period was ending in late 2011, he even came out and said something to the effect of "We know this isn't going to be a popular decision, and people will leave, but we have to do it." Did people leave? You bet. But a lot of people stuck around as well because they supported not only the incoming improvements, but also the team that was (at the time) working on content for 1.0 and ARR at the same time. Word got out about how things were improving, and people subscribed. No swindle. No suckering. He put everything out there, and people liked what they saw.

But did they add Kurt Angle to the mix?