![]() The secret to long-term operations is to communicate with players In that sense as well, I am very grateful to our customers, and thankful for their continual support. However, FFXI players are very kind, and there are many who also believe both sides need to work together and liven things up. After all, if we didn't do that, then it wouldn’t really matter who’s making the game. This goes back to what I mentioned about motivation, but as a developer, the important idea is to make a game you’d personally enjoy, rather than just simply creating “what the customers want.” I don’t mean that we ignore the players’ opinions, but what we try to do is to reconcile those opinions with the development team's ideas. ![]() It sounds like you really had to learn as you went during the early days. In that sense, our mindset during the early days may have been unfit for creating MMORPGs. On the other hand, back in the early days of development, we still had the same mindset from when we were making conventional console games, which was to capitalize on the developers’ uniqueness and only think about the players who would find that sort of game interesting. Nowadays, there are systems in place which allow the development team to listen to player feedback and also convey their intentions. Perhaps their choice is something I could keep to myself, but at the same time, I feel that it wouldn’t hurt for more people to know that there are members who’ve made that sort of commitment to work on FFXI.Īs for how you interact with your player community, do you feel that it’s changed over the course of long-term operations? Given their careers as game developers, it’s a highly critical decision. Within the FFXI team, there are people who’ve put their career plan on hold until FFXI celebrates its 20th anniversary and finds a clear trajectory forward, which I truly admire. Working on the same project for 20 years must require an enormous level of commitment. Like any other form of entertainment, games come to an end when the providing party loses interest, so I believe it's very valuable that our division offers those kinds of initiatives. We keep our team invigorated by rotating roles within the development team or Creative Business Unit III’s other titles, such as assigning long-time level designers to content planning, for instance. The same goes for the FFXIV development team, I believe. As such, we're always conscious of nurturing a work environment where the team can tackle their work with a challenging spirit. Another one might be fostering an environment where you can receive positive feedback directly from players who enjoy your game.Īt the end of the day, I believe the aspects of content quality affected by the developers’ motivation are conveyed to the people playing the game. For example, it might be a substantial salary, a work environment that enables you to try new things, or noticeable improvements in your personal growth. It sounds like a unique burden of developing MMORPGs that have been around for a while.īut that’s also why we need a motivator that surpasses those kinds of feelings. As professionals, sometimes we can't help but compare our day-to-day work with what’s feasible with the latest technology and feel that the grass is greener on the other side. However, when it comes to developing MMORPGs, upgrading the base systems and graphics engine is no easy feat. The key is how you go about maintaining their motivation to prevent that from happening.Īmbitious developers tend to have a desire to compete with the rest of the world by creating state-of-the-art games with cutting-edge technology. But we're also only human, so if someone were to say, "I don't care if I'm getting paid, I don't want to work on the game anymore," then that'd be out of our hands. On one hand, customers are absolutely right when they say, “But we’re still paying, you have to continue development!” and I believe it's an inevitable fact. I don’t mean to be rude to our customers, but development on a game is doomed if the developers lose their motivation. The more I think about it, the more I agree with Mr. An MMORPG isn’t something you can consider finished after developing up to a certain extent, and you must make a continual commitment to the people playing your game. It's extremely crucial for the developers to be intrinsically motivated in their work, like being able to measure their personal improvement, for example. Is there anything you’d consider a necessity, requirement, or secret formula when it comes to long-term MMORPG operations? This year is FFXI’s 20th anniversary and the ninth year since FFXIV relaunched.
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