I believe a generous free trial paired with a subscription model is currently the best way to go about MMO monetization when it comes to ethics and financial viability.
I take monthly cost over aggressive fomo advertisements of dumber and dumber immersion breaking skins and performance hogging flashy effects any day. Even worse if there is also pay to win. Most of those mtx monetization models prey on wales who fall for this type of addiction easily.
Good. Free trial is continuing to be all but the 3 latest expansions, and is expanding with the next expac launch. It’d be nice if I could switch my account to limited-access so I can do free trial content on my main even if my sub lapses, though.
But them being driven by subscriptions has helped them keep the game focused on player enjoyment. I hope it never goes F2P q-q
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a new short interview with Eurogamer, director Naoki Yoshida revealed that Square Enix has no plans to make Final Fantasy 14 a free-to-play MMORPG, although the free trial could expand further.
Practically everyone knows that you can play Final Fantasy 14 for free until you reach level 60 (and soon at level 70) with two expansions, but this does not mean that the entire title will become free.
“Since a huge amount of time and money has been invested in expansion packs, revenue from expansion sales is still very important to continue making additional content of this magnitude.
We would like to constantly aim for the best also from a commercial point of view to continue to create a lot of content to taste”.
In addition to this, Square Enix probably does not want to introduce in Final Fantasy 14 monetization systems often discussed and criticized present in other free-to-play MMORPGs such as Battle Pass, gacha and advertising, preferring instead to leave the game intact.
Final Fantasy 14 is available on PC, PS4 and PS5, while it will arrive in spring 2024 on Xbox Series.
The original article contains 224 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 17%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
