Final Fantasy XIV Is So Popular, Square Enix Ran Out of Digital Copies

[Tsing]

Image: Square Enix



One of the benefits of selling games digitally is that there’s technically an unlimited supply to go around, but Square Enix has proven that lack of stock could still be a real possibility even for digital releases. As indicated by users on r/ffxiv and ResetEra, Square Enix recently managed to sell through all of its digital copies of Final Fantasy XIV Complete Edition, a bundle that includes the standard version of the popular MMORPG and its various expansions. While the digital version of the game appears to be widely available again, FFXIV fans couldn’t purchase a download code for the PC or PlayStation 4 versions of the game yesterday. As one reader suggested, it’s likely that Square Enix ran out of pre-generated digital codes due to the game’s unexpected popularity...

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[Peter_Brosdahl]

"ran out of digital codes"

Put me down for that for the next catastrophic event leading to a price hike for something. Looking at you nand/gpu market!

 

[Dogsofjune]

Don't put ideas like that out there

 

[Burticus]

ran out of digital copies... now I have heard everything

 

[Auriana]

The logical reason to this is that they're likely trying to mitigate a potential issue in excessive new user flow causing severe congestion across servers.

Asmongold, an extremely popular/successful WoW streamer started to play FFXIV in the past week. He pulled in an audience of over 200k viewers on the first night, most of whom were WoW players and hadn't played FFXIV before. Now that he's enjoying himself, it's pulling in a significant number of disillusioned WoW players that are fed up with Blizzard's decisions over the past half decade or more.

FFXIV's server infrastructure is not very flexible due to the legacy codebase inherited from the failed 1.0 release, so it's good that they're being proactive before it becomes more of a problem.

 

[Brian_B]

The logical reason to this is that they're likely trying to mitigate a potential issue in excessive new user flow causing severe congestion across servers.

Asmongold, an extremely popular/successful WoW streamer started to play FFXIV in the past week. He pulled in an audience of over 200k viewers on the first night, most of whom were WoW players and hadn't played FFXIV before. Now that he's enjoying himself, it's pulling in a significant number of disillusioned WoW players that are fed up with Blizzard's decisions over the past half decade or more.

FFXIV's server infrastructure is not very flexible due to the legacy codebase inherited from the failed 1.0 release, so it's good that they're being proactive before it becomes more of a problem.

They have always been extremely conservative with their infrastructure - limited about of player housing, very aggressive login queueing, limiting new character creation per servers, etc. To their credit, apart from some DOS attacks that pop up on occasion, their infrastructure is holding up fairly well.