Square Enix Restarts Final Fantasy XIV Digital Sales on January 25

Square Enix will start selling mmorpg Final Fanatasy XIV online again from January 25th. The playing time of current players is stabilizing. In addition, new servers are coming online, so the maker thinks the sale is justified again. The sale was discontinued in December.

Game producer and director Naoki Yoshida warns that if the servers become extremely overloaded again, sales of the game could be stopped again. He realizes that certain Worlds still have extremely high traffic during peak times and would understand if some players thought this decision was premature. He asks those users for understanding.

Yoshida believes it would be justifiable to restart sales as the game time and login frequency of current players normalize, and a new data center will open on January 25 for players in Oceania. This will receive five Worlds, two more than previously communicated, and should ensure that other data centers are less burdened by Oceanic users. These users should also experience fewer latency issues. In addition, players who move to these new Worlds will not have to pay a transfer fee. On January 25, the service to move the Home World to other Worlds will also be available again.

In addition to Oceania, Japan, North America and Europe will also receive additional data centers. Four new Worlds are planned for the European data centers, two per data center. These additional Worlds should be ready by July this year. In the summer of next year, an extra data center with eight new Worlds should be built. The producer and director says he would like to see more Worlds soon, but his company is limited by global chip shortages.

Square Enix stopped selling Final Fantasy XIV a month ago, two weeks after the release of the Endwalker expansion. This expansion resulted in an influx of additional users, causing customers to experience ‘extremely long’ waiting times. Earlier this week, Yoshida spoke about the criticism he and his developers received around the release of Endwalker, for example about the fact that the expansion came later than promised, writes Kotaku, among others. He felt that some of them went too far with their criticism and that he wants the ‘verbal violence’ to stop.