"We had talks with Andrew House earlier, but with the transition to a new president I am afraid we have not properly met them had proper introductions, or sat down for a dialogue," Yoshida said. (Sony's new president, Kenichiro Yoshida, started in April.)

"So unfortunately we don't have any visibility on the present stance Sony is taking. We're hoping that with all the transition there may be some kind of change but we haven't had the chance to sit down and talk." On if Yoshida is worried that the increase of matches as a service such as Anthem, The Section 2, and Fallout 76 might be strong competition to Final Fantasy XIV with Equipment because they do not have subscriptions.

"I'm not concerned at all," he said. "I believe that it is not possible to have no form of microtransactions but still have free updates in a really large scale... Together with free-to-play games, a great deal of the instances the developers are scrambling to attempt to create as many items and content as possible to monetize. If you look at just how much effort is going into creating those individual monetization items, I believe the tools are better utilized creating a brand new game."

So no, he said, he is not concerned about online games with no subscriptions. "Using A Realm Reborn, currently in operation for approximately five decades, we've assembled upon us a great track record," Yoshida said. "And so we believe the outside interference should not influence us. As creators which are on FFXIV, we all can continue to do is work quite hard to continue providing great content to the game... that said, Fallout 76 looks awesome." On whether MMO-style battle has grown stale, and when Yoshida would ever consider overhauling FFXIV's battle.

"We feel there is no reason to perform a swapping out or change it entirely," he explained. "If players do not like how the battle system is set up today, there are many different games that they could appreciate in the play-style they favor. Say for example, some players prefer more of a non-target type of play, and they feel FF14 Gil's combat system seems antiquated or hard to play with, those are players and it is likely not most players' feedback, and it does not affect the present players who are currently enjoying the material. It'd be better to address that with that kind of play-style at a brand new and separate game which we create that's targeted to a new generation of players -- possibly in a Final Fantasy 19 or 20 or something like that."