Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, the long-awaited update to Final Fantasy XIV, won’t be taking the popular “Free-to-Play” route that other MMOs have, as the game’s director Naoki Yoshida explains below.

“With the free-to-play model, you’ll get huge income one month, but the next month it depletes,” Yoshida said. “Most MMOs have investors in the background and the company uses the profit and splits the profit with the investors. But, if the game’s not successful, and it doesn’t reach the target, then they have to switch to free-to-play to try and get just a little profit from it. Among the MMOs in the market, only [those by] Blizzard and Square Enix are making money without investors in the background.”

Yoshida also goes on to say that he doesn’t think that it was the subscriptions that hurt recent MMOs such as Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World. Rather, to Yoshida, the quality of the games themselves proved to be the biggest detractor.  One certainly can’t completely bash Square’s MMOs, such as Final Fantasy XI which has done extremely well, even over a decade after its release, even if you compare it to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.

No matter how you look at it, though, Final Fantasy XIV‘s initial 2010 release was so bad that it may have possibly caused Square’s $150 million loss in 2011. It’s hard not to think that this subscription-based update might follow the same path.  In my personal opinion, I don’t think the monthly subscription is needed. Square Enix does not have any investors in its MMO, however, so money has to be made somehow.

Let us know what you think about what Yoshida said and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn‘s subscription model below.

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