In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Square Enix producer Naoki Yoshida shared his thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV and the challenges of an always-online game. Yoshida expects content for years to come after the upcoming Endwalker expansion. In fact, Square Enix CEO encourages the team to strive for more as the player base grows. This leads to challenges for a multi-platform release of the game though. With more content and development time, there’s little room for expanding the ecosystem.
In a video call interview with The Washington Post, Yoshida said “Final Fantasy XIV” may never end, as long as people keep returning. At its current audience growth rate, Yoshida said Square Enix see at least another five years for the online world.
“Even now, our CEO is encouraging us to strive for more players and for 30 million adventurers, and he still has future plans for us,” Yoshida said through a translator. “Luckily, we don’t see any stopping in our momentum. At one point we thought maybe we might plateau, but fortunately our player base just continues to expand and grow.”
This means expansions beyond 2021 and “Endwalker.” But at least for the near future, it won’t mean new platforms. Despite the game’s success, Yoshida says a lot of his team’s time is spent on creating the expansions, and leaves little room for expanding to the Xbox or others, as much as they’d love to see the game beyond the PlayStation and PC ports.
Yoshida is still quiet on Final Fantasy XVI news but this is for good reason as the game will be shown off at a later date. In the meantime, stay tuned at Final Weapon for more Japanese gaming news and support us on Patreon for more content!
