Dawntrail Launches Today And The Board of Turalism

All of the preliminaries are over. Today the latest expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, Dawntrail, launches. Before going on, a bit of housekeeping. Make sure to register your copy of Dawntrail if you have early access. In one of those moves the Square Enix website is famous for, registering an early access key for the expansion doesn't register the expansion itself. I have the feeling accounting is involved in the form of counting deferred revenue. But no mater. Players have until July 5th to register their key.

Launch day is here

I will admit as I get older I begin taking enjoyment out of some of the surrounding content around an expansion launch. CCP Games did so with its Upwell Consortium website. Very corporate and in keeping with the EVE universe. Creative Studio III published its own special website for Dawntrail, the Board of Turalism's TourTural.com.

Both are trying to sell something. But where the Upwell Consortium knows internet spaceships are serious business, Tural's Board of Turalism is a more light-hearted affair as the below video shows.

Honestly, I can't wait for the new cookbook for Dawntrail bound to come out. I also anticipate a few hangovers.

From the Board of Turalism website

I also want to point out someone over in Creative Studio III decided to include a customer support chat.

Even offers customer support

I haven't tried the feature out yet. Hopefully the design is better than the typical Square Enix website I'm used to using.

I do have the feeling I'll go back every so often and see whether the website is just a bit of launch fun or a site worth checking up on. But for now, may the queues not swallow you up logging into the game.

Cloud Imperium Games Posts A 13.1% YoY Revenue Gain In Q2 2024

After a horrendous first quarter of revenue, Cloud Imperium Games pulled ahead of last year's sales numbers in the second quarter of 2024. The company closed out Q2 with $7.3 million in sales in June according to the CCU Game dashboard, a 7.4% year-over-year increase over June 2023's $6.8 million. For the quarter, this year's Q2 revenue of $37 million was 13.1% greater than the $32.8 million posted in the second quarter of 2023. For the year, CIG recorded $54.4 million through the first half of 2024, a 1.3% increase over the same period in 2023.

For those who keep track of new accounts (aka "new citizens"), June's 21,554 was 37.5% smaller than the total of 34,504 in June 2023. For the quarter, CIG attracted the creation of 141.453 new paid accounts, a 55% decrease over Q2 2023's total of 219,223. For the first half of 2024, account generation is only down 25.9%, 262,541 accounts over the first 6 months of 2024 vs last year's number of 354,406.

I have the feeling we can put to rest any link between account creation and sales generation. However, for those who feel account generation is a sign of health of the company, I'll continue reporting the number.

Overall, the recorded sales tracked on the CCU Game dashboard is $711.7 million since the launch of the Kickstarter in October 2012. But Cloud Imperium has additional funding sources not tracked by the dashboard. Overall, the company has recorded $810.3 million in confirmed revenue (the funding page & the 2022 financial report).

• Sales/Pledges: $711.7 million (through 30 June 2024)
• Subscriptions: $33.0 million (through 31 December 2022)
• All other sources: $65.6 million (through 31 December 2022)

In addition, the company has received a total of $63.25 million in outside investment. According to the 2022 financial report, $4.8 million of the amount was returned to investors in 2020. Including the outside investment money, the total amount raised by CIG to create Squadron 42 and Star Citizen is $866.4 million.

While CIG has increased year-over-year revenue, the company has not pulled itself out of financial concern. Over the past 5 years, sales have grown an average of 27% per year. Back in February, I calculated (aka guessed) CIG would need to keep up with that average revenue increase to keep up with costs. We also know CIG does not have enough cash in reserve to cover paying out the Calders if they decided to exercise their put option in the first quarter of 2025. Due to the way the deal is structured, I believe the Calders will wait until the first quarter of 2028 in order to get a piece of Squadron 42 sales. Still, that's a minimum of a $130 million hanging over the heads of the owner of Cloud Imperium Games in three years with the need to keep the company funded and functioning in the meantime.

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail Patch Notes - Text Commands

The early access period for Dawntrail began yesterday. I thought I would try to cover the patch notes like what I have done for the last few EVE Online expansions. I have to put in similar because I do have a real life job and CCP drops their patch notes on Fridays so I have the weekend to work on them. 

One day until the official launch of Dawntrail

This fifteenth post in the series will cover information labeled "System" in the patch notes: Text Commands. I do not plan on covering all the items in the System section of the patch notes as some of the items are a little to esoteric even for me, but I figure these additions and updates are of enough interest to warrant a post.

New Commands - The following commands were added in Dawntrail.

Updated Commands

The following text commands can now be used to adjust volume levels even during events such as cutscenes:

• /mastervolume
• /bgm
• /voice
• /systemsounds
• /ambientsounds
• /soundeffects
• /soundeffectsself
• /soundeffectsparty
• /soundeffectsother
• /performsounds
• /systemsoundsspeaker

New parameters have been added to the /hud text command: JobGauge1 and JobGauge2. These parameters can be used to toggle the display of job gauges.

The following parameters have been added to the /alarm text command:

• se00/se01/se02/se03/se04/se05
• mute

New parameters for new jobs and areas have been added to the /search text command.

New parameters have been added to the /petsize text command for Solar Bahamut.