When you zoom out a little it makes a lot of sense. FF15 and FF13 were both failures, company had serious financial issues before FF14 took off. Hopefully you will get to enjoy FF16, and making that game wouldn’t have been possible without the success of 14.
FFXIV also has the least addictive qualities of any MMO I have played in my experience. There’s very little FOMO & you’re encouraged to play at whatever pace you enjoy. Many players just play through the story and treat it as a mostly single player game.
I wouldn't call FF13 or FF15 failures from a sales point of view; they both performed strongly. From a "brand damage" point of view, though, they were catastrophic. I think the development of FF16 speaks for itself: they gave the development of a mainline single-player title to Creative Business Unit III, their FF14 studio, because they have a rep for making consistently good content and delivering it on time. Meanwhile, no one expects Nomura to reveal anything about the inevitable FF7 Remake sequel for at least the next 3 years.
FF14 is great, though, as a non-MMO player. The community is largely helpful to newcomers, the story content is very accessible and requires little to no grinding, and the game as a whole doesn't gate important plot developments behind high-tier endgame content the way most MMOs do.
> they gave the development of a mainline single-player title to Creative Business Unit III, their FF14 studio, because they have a rep for making consistently good content and delivering it on time.
I think it's simply because the other CBU's are swamped with work.
- The old business division (what they called Creative Business units before the restructure 5 years ago) that made FF15 split off into Luminous Studios, and went straight from FF15 DLC into Forspoken
- CBU1 (AKA, the Nomura division) handles FF7R as well as Kingdom Hearts. Two huge franchises. Adding another FF onto the pile would be overwhelming
- CBU2 is "The Bravely division". I wouldn't be surprised if they get to try their own hand at a Final Fantasy one day, but it would have been too early for FF16. FF16 was likely being worked on before Octopath Traveler.
- CBU4 was always a smaller sort of "spinoff" studio. Nowadays they focus more on the mobile market. Very little chance they were ever considered.
I don't think Square Enix sees the last few FF games as damaging as fans do. They simply have a lot of work and some teams have more or less room for that work.
Funnily enough, it may be a possibility of FF17 having a mobile client given Genshin's success, but this is just random conjecture
From a sales standpoint alone no, but from a profitability standpoint definitely. A lot of time and money was poured into developing a game engine from the ground up that ultimately ended up not being very good and thankfully is being replaced by Unreal in FFXVI.
Crystal Tools was supposed to make development for several games easier & faster, but instead it took more effort to complete than expected & was still difficult to work with after it was complete.
In the space of MMOs FFXIV tries to do most things right though. There is hardly any "you must log in every day to progress", you can still experience all the old content at your pace (with some limitations, of course), even the seasonal events are usually done in 10-30 minutes and are available for a whole month. I know, it's easy to just name the things that are done better than in e.g. World of Warcraft, but YoshiP has said repeatedly (and this is very very rare for MMO studios): You don't have to play every day, and if you're done playing the content from the latest patch, go out and play other games, then come back when you like. It's basically the antithsis of FOMO. The only other example that comes to my mind is Guild Wars 2, which is actually some "come back 3 years later and continue where you left off".
You can basically engage with the entire story of XIV without touching the MMO part at all. Especially now that they're going back and enabling NPC party members for the story dungeons.
