[david]

Square Enix CEO feels Final Fantasy 14 'greatly damaged' brand
by Alexander Sliwinski on Sep 28th 2011 6:40PM

Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada stated at a recent press conference that the Final Fantasy brand had been "greatly damaged" by the launch of Final Fantasy 14.

"We'll continue with our reform work, which basically amounts to fully redoing the game, and hope to revive the FF14 that should have been released," said Wada, according to Andriasang (translating a report on Sponichi).

The launch of Final Fantasy 14 for PC last year, even by a conservative measure, was an unmitigated disaster. A PS3 version never saw the light of day, as the publisher restructured the staff to fix, er, almost everything. Wada apologized for the game at that time and the title still hasn't implemented its intended subscription fee to this day -- and given the freemium trend in MMOs, likely never will.