Yesterday the developer of the Final Fantasy XIV mod Mare Synchronos closed down the mod after being contacted by Square Enix' legal team. I first heard of Mare about three years ago from someone I knew who told me about a mod that would allow people to see what they actually looked like. Basically people who used local mods could share their appearance with others.
I probably need to go into greater detail so here's what I found that might remain posted (for now).
Mare Synchronos is an unofficial third-party plugin that allows players to synchronize their character's appearance with other players. This synchronization includes character data such as gear, hairstyles, and other customizable features.
Key Features
Appearance Synchronization: The primary function of Mare Synchronos is to allow players to share and sync their character's appearance with others in real-time. This means that if one player makes changes to their character's gear or appearance, those changes will be visible to others using the plugin.
Ease of Use: The plugin is designed to be user-friendly, allowing players to easily sync and update their character appearances with others who have the plugin installed.
Required Plugins: Mare Synchronos requires two other plugins to function properly:
Penumbra: A plugin allows for dynamic mod loading and unloading. It is essential for handling the modifications necessary for Mare Synchronos to work.
Glamourer: A plugin allows for the manipulation of character appearance data, enabling the detailed customization options that Mare Synchronos synchronizes between players.
In my opinion Square Enix hopes that by closing down Mare will drastically reduce the effects of Penumbra and especially Glamourer. Penumbra allows players to wear custom-made outfits, modify tattoos, and custom emotes. The latter mod actually can access all wearable items in the game and allow players to apply any dye to the gear. The shutdown of Mare limits the effect to a player's client, thus hopefully removing a lot of the incentives to use Penumbra and Glamourer.
With the introduction out of the way, why would Square Enix pick now to crack down on Mare? Here are the reasons I came up with.
Don't talk about Fight Club...FFXIV's Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida has unofficially had a policy of turning a blind eye to mods as long as their use wasn't flaunted. Over the last three years the use of Mare became more mainstream leading to less discretion. I have to wonder if this year's Moonfire Faire setting was too much for players to resist. I can see players holding poolside events on the site. Did the activity just become too much for Square Enix to ignore?
Equalizing the PC/console experience. Personally not a big reason but I don't work in the halls of Square Enix. The game, available on Playstation for years, launched on XBox in 2024 and reportedly might soon appear on the Nintendo Switch 2. Mare potentially gave PC users a very enhanced social experience, for good or bad, than that available to console users. The difference is so great some PC users wouldn't hang around players without the enhanced glamour mods. A situation I believe Square Enix would like to avoid.
Negative impact on new content engagement. I am constantly hearing about how activity in FFXIV is down. The fashionistas who used to run content for glamour didn't have to with Mare running. Think about how many people ran the Nier raids during Shadowbringer just to get the 2B leggings. With Mare and the associated mods players weren't restricted to just a few choices to try to look sexy.
On a more serious note I wonder how much Mare affected Cosmic Exploration. With the expansion of gear with two dye-channels and a new set of dye available from the new feature perhaps the lack of activity on the moon is noticeable. After all, a large segment of assumed consumers of the new dyes didn't need them due to using Mare. And those are examples that just popped into my head as I typed out this post.
Lost cash shop sales. I've thought about the negative impact Mare had on cash shop sales for a couple of years now. Why purchase items from the cash shop if they are available through Mare? With the news from the latest financial report showing even MMO revenue is down for Square Enix the time might have come to tighten up the rules to bring in more money.
Security and copyright. I'm lumping the two subjects together due to the way Mare worked. The mod was peer-to-peer software that had to copy files from one user's computer to another. The security implications are kind of obvious. What is probably less obvious are copyright violations. I know that game studios are usually pretty sensitive about making sure the intellectual property of others isn't included in their games. As an example, I see so many Fortnite emotes imported into FFXIV and ported into the game world using Mare. Here's an example.
Game rating. Perhaps the most important argument is maintaining the rating for the game. In the US the game is rated "T for Teen" by the Entertainment Software Rating Board and PEGI 16 in Europe. With those types of ratings I don't believe anyone is going to demand age verification to play FFXIV. But some of those mods are extremely Not Safe For Work.
If Mare and the NSFW mods are seen as approved for use by Square Enix, could the game fall into the adult games category? I bring that up over the recent controversy of payment processors refusing to work with Steam over the presence of adult games on the platform. And let's not forget the UK's Online Safety Act which requires age verification for things like access to adult video games online. I'm pretty sure the company would like to prevent any further barriers erected between players and FFXIV beyone the horrible website required for signing up to purchase the game.
Do I expect Yoshi-P to continue on the warpath against these mods? Only if people rub his face into the fact people are using them to such an extent he can't ignore them any longer. I think that happened with Mare. Then again, who knows what else might come up.
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