Last Friday I wondered if Blizzard and Square Enix would alternate months for releasing content. Yesterday we got the answer. Dragonflight patch 10.0.5 will release on 24 January. Not only will the patch drop in the same month as Final Fantasy XIV's patch 6.3, but the WoW patch drops the same day as FFXIV's patch 6.31. For those who don't play Final Fantasy XIV, patch 6.31 introduces the new Ultimate raid, The Omega Protocol.
On a somewhat bright note, one of patch 10.0.5's new features, The Trading Post, won't go live until 1 February, so that pushes some of the content back. But with the new Storm's Fury world event, I can imagine some players might be torn between games.
I stopped playing World of Warcraft a month or two after the opening of the Ahn'Qiraj gates back in 2006, so the dueling patches we apparently will see between the two games throughout 2023 doesn't really affect me. But during the great WoW refugee migration in 2021 I met a lot of refugees. Sometimes some would stay in Eorzea while their friends would return to Azeroth to check out the latest. I talked to a couple of sad players in that situation.
I was hoping that the release cycles would allow for players to bounce between games, constantly consuming freshly released content. And what individuals could do, groups of friends could do as well. Of course, that might not please the beancounters who depend on statistics like monthly and daily active users. But for players who don't stick with just one game? The situation probably would have worked out quite nicely.
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