http://store.steampowered.com/app/262341/

I'll buy it when I don't have to pay a monthly fee.

So never I guess. FFXI is still monthly as well and was the most successful FF ever made in terms of profit.

FFXI also came out in a time where every MMO had a monthly fee. You're probably right, but it could still happen.

Any other dev/pub and you'd most likely be right, but anyone still waiting for XIV to go F2P at this point is fooling themselves. It may get some faux-F2P transactions eventually (e.g. cosmetic stuff), but the game itself will always have a sub.

Not F2P, something more along the lines of Guild Wars 2, or what happened to The Secret World. You buy the game and then you don't need to buy anything else to play it.

That will never happen at all. They are truly committed to this system and I think it is the best way to expect constantly updates as well.

Haha and just a few days after i bought it directly from Square, oh well :D

When I can get a month for $5-$10, then I will pay $5-$10 and play it for a month and then never again.

My sub ran out, and I can't seem to renew it via Square's page anymore. Unfortunately, I am located in Japan so I can't buy a NA account via Steam. I don't think I could reactive my NA characters from a Japanese account? I may just have to wait for it to come out on PS4

@beziercurve said:

You may have to just wait for another time during the day. Or try again in about an hour. Most of us are all on Ultros. It's pretty populated but nowhere near the madness it was in the first month.

He is right. This game is going strong, it is in absolutely no danger of going F2P any time soon. Hell I sometimes still see queues to log in my server on prime hours. Game has good graphics, good end game, nice crafting, regular updates, hit at a time when there was no competition, and appeals to all the FFXI vets who stopped playing that not to mention the in general FF junkies. It's niche is carved it isn't going anywhere.

You guys missed the part where I said "not free to play". I meant that you walk into a store, you pick up a copy of the game, you walk up to the clerk, you give him or her money for the game, and then you pay no further money to keep playing the game. You are still giving someone money to play the game. That means that it isn't free to play, and it is the model I was hoping to see. I'd like to see more of that model in the MMO realm, anyway.

And once again, I'll agree that getting rid of the monthly fee is unlikely, I was just expressing that I'm interested in playing it but I'm not paying a monthly fee to do so. I played the beta and really enjoyed it.

I think most conflate the two because there's so much overlap (in terms of design mentality) between games that have done it in a manner many people are uncomfortable with. There's definitely a difference, but even stuff like Guild Wars 2 has it's drawbacks and some of their problems stem from the payment model they've chosen to design the game around. Each one has it's own pros and cons and they all inform/dictate the content. The people that play the online final fantasies are a smaller but dedicated audience more than willing to do the financial dialogue dance with the developers. This game in particular will most likely have a longer tail than some will pay attention to because of the team that designed it, how they designed and how up-front they were (and still are) about the entire process. So anytime someone says they're interested but not willing to pay for it, it always highlights the friction in the mentality of different playerbases that exist for MMOs now. The payment type FFXIV decided to go with is among the oldest and has some of the most loyal audiences that are terrified of what both B2P and F2P even entail, as every-time that 6-month switch has happened it usually hasn't been for the better long term (as least as far as communities are concerned).

Yoshida and co. seem to be acutely aware of this which is just another reason why a lot of people are having no problem paying for it. Heck, he's still defending it to this day (http://schedule.gdconf.com/session-id/828297).

Well considering that I think the servers may have been down for some insane maintenance and won't come up until like tomorrow or something.... Yeah probably could have picked a better time.

Also as an aside, when you say "F2P" to most MMO players all that means is there is no monthly fee. It doesn't mean you don't have to buy the game.

Is there some sort of trial for this game? Their official site is a mess and I can't find anything there.

No trial for the game. The best you can do is try the PS4 beta if you have the system.

As to the subscription, there's no way we would be getting these massive free updates every few months if there was no subscription. The game would be much worse off and I would have almost certainly quit by Christmas after getting bored with the launch content while waiting for a full expansion.