Final Fantasy XIV is discontinuing sales because it’s just too popular

The boss of Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker has announced that all sales of the full versions of the game will be stopped. The reason for this is the sudden great popularity of the MMORPG, which causes extremely long queues when logging in. Players also receive a total of 3 weeks of free playtime.

The situation in brief:

• Since the summer of 2021, FFXIV has seen a sharp increase in the number of players. Due to the change of big WoW content creators like Asmongold, Preach and Bellular to FFXIV, the MMORPG received a lot of media attention, which caused many new players and records on Steam.
• But it also caused problems because the game’s servers weren’t designed for the amount of players. FFXIV director Naoki Yoshida apologized at the time for the queues and server problems. Measures such as the automatic AFK logout have been introduced.
• Before the launch of the new Endwalker addon, Yoshida communicated again that the situation has unfortunately not improved. Due to the global shortage of semiconductors, it is extremely difficult for the team to get new servers in a short time, says Yoshida. Because of this, he issued a warning to the players that there would be problems with the launch of Endwalker.
• Since Endwalker’s Early Access on December 3rd, FFXIV has been overrun every day. Especially in the evening, queues of 3,000 to 7,000 players form, and they progress extremely slowly. In addition, players are plagued by Error 2002, which throws them out and often puts them back at the end of the line.

The MMORPG is currently simply too popular and is being controlled by more players than it can hold. Director Yoshida has now commented on the situation again.

The delivery and sale of FFXIV will cease

This is what Yoshida says: In the new statement, the head of FFXIV presented new measures that the team should take against the overcrowding of the servers. Primarily, this includes the complete cessation of sales of the full versions of FFXIV.

Due to the high number of players, especially at peak times, there are extremely long waiting times, which regularly exceed our server capacity. For this reason, we have decided to temporarily suspend the sale and delivery of the FINAL FANTASY XIV Starter Edition and the Complete Edition. Even though players with an active subscription can prefer to log in, it is currently not possible for players with the free trial version to play outside of the late evening / early morning hours. To enable them to play, registration for new free trial accounts will also be temporarily suspended.

Yoshida explains that this measure will be phased in as Square Enix has to coordinate with its sales partners.

This situation has happened several times at FFXIV. For the release of the reboot “A Realm Reborn” sales had to be temporarily suspended because the servers were full. In addition, the digital version of FFXIV in the Square Enix Store was briefly “sold out” in the summer of 2021.

3 weeks of playing time as compensation

That was also said: The long queues and problems with the Error 2002 have been going on for two weeks now and annoy many players who do not come to play in the evening because of their work.

Therefore, all players who have an active subscription in FFXIV on December 21st will receive 14 days of free playtime as compensation for the inconvenience. Together with the previous compensation, the players get a total of 21 days of free playing time in the MMORPG.

What’s next

So it is with the updates: Despite the server problems, the FFXIV team plans to stick to their schedule for releasing new updates.

• The normal mode of the new raid Pandaemonium will appear on December 21st
• On January 4th, the epic version of the raid goes live as well as new armor, recipes for Crafter and the fun dungeon Euphoraton.

Director Yoshida apologizes to the FFXIV raiding community at this point. When each raid tier is released, FFXIV, as in many other MMORPGs, has a race for the first kill of all bosses.

This race is now negatively impacted by the server problems. There is no guarantee that all raiders will have fair chances in the race because they now depend on the length of the queues and the 2002 error.

A postponement of the patch would also have an effect on the following patches such as 6.1 and therefore 6.05 should currently still appear on January 4th, according to Yoshida.

This is how it is with the servers: The FFXIV developers have been working on building a new data center and new worlds since July. But even though the team is investing “a lot more money than usual,” work is being delayed due to the semiconductor shortage and the physical scarcity of server equipment.

With the help of IT equipment suppliers from all over the world, we are slowly getting information about delivery dates and numbers. With the high specification requirements for FFXIV servers and the fact that adding a single logical data center requires hundreds of servers, it invariably takes us a lot more time, but we are gradually seeing progress. Accordingly, the server and infrastructure teams are working together to plan new additions and we hope to be able to present some kind of roadmap by the end of January 2022.

The plan is to add new servers in each region, and especially in Europe and North America. It is currently not yet clear whether this will be carried out gradually or in a major update.

As soon as there is news on this, there will be another statement from Yoshida.

We also recommend trying out the MMORPG in our podcast, although it is currently not a good time for it:

Play Final Fantasy XIV if you want to do yourselves something good