A sold-out digital product sounds like a contradiction, but that is what happened with Final Fantasy XIV in July 2021. On Square Enix’s official North American store, the PC Complete Edition of the MMO, in download version, showed up as sold out, and those who wanted to buy had to join a waiting list.
The most likely explanation, according to GamingBolt, was technical: either Square Enix had run out of its stock of codes generated in advance, or the servers were at their limit. In either case, the underlying reason was the same: the game was going through an excellent phase. A few months earlier, Final Fantasy XIV had passed 22 million registered users, and Square Enix itself said that Endwalker, the next expansion, was getting far more pre-orders than the previous one, Shadowbringers. The company even announced a multimillion investment to expand the servers.
What stands out in this story is how Final Fantasy XIV turned the game around. The original launch, in 2010, was a failure, and Square Enix rebuilt the MMO from scratch until relaunching it as A Realm Reborn. Endwalker would be the end of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc, started precisely there. For those arriving at that moment, the Complete Edition was the gateway, bringing together the base game and the expansions.
At the time, Endwalker was set for November 23, 2021, on PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
What came next
Endwalker was delayed and came out on December 7, 2021, with Naoki Yoshida once again as director and producer and a soundtrack by Masayoshi Soken. The expansion raised the level cap to 90, debuted the Sage and Reaper jobs and received universal acclaim on Metacritic for the PC and PS5 versions, with praise for the story’s conclusion. It also received an award of excellence at the 2022 Japan Game Awards. A nice detail of the promotion: singer Sia recorded a version of “Fly Me to the Moon” for the expansion.
Source: GamingBolt.
Capitão Pixel
Comments (0)
Be the first to comment.