Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida has said he's still interested in bringing the MMORPG to Nintendo's Switch and Microsoft's Xbox One, and has had meetings with executives from the respective platform holders to make it happen.
Speaking to Kotaku, Yoshida said he "would love for as many players to be on FFXIV as possible" and "conversations have been had with Phil Spencer of Microsoft, and the upper management teams of Nintendo."
However, Yoshida has said he wants both companies to meet one major condition: "the game has to have the capability of cross-platform play." One of the issues Yoshida noted, however, was that many companies don't consider how updates to the way online services are operated and regulated can impact an MMORPG.
"Those can become a hurdle when we consider operating FFXIV for an extended period of time," he said. "So when I talk to those first-party companies, I ask them, 'Do you have the capability to prepare for that, do you have the resolve that you're going to make sure to take responsibility and take care of those, do you have that willingness?'
"If we are able to come to some sort of agreement, a handshake so to speak, or if it does end up being that unfortunately we can't do a handshake with Final Fantasy XIV, either way we'll make sure to communicate with our players. But we have been tenacious--we've been trying to keep at it and be persistent about our conversations."
Getting Sony to open up its online services to Xbox and Nintendo customers may be an insurmountable obstacle for Yoshida and Square Enix, however. Sony has previously opted not to support cross-platform online player for Rocket League and, more recently, Minecraft.
During E3 2017, Nintendo and Microsoft announced that Rocket League and Minecraft would be cross-play compatible between Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PC players. This has meant that, currently, Sony's PlayStation is the only platform not supporting cross-play for those games. You can read more about why Sony isn't supporting cross-play here.
Square Enix recently launched Stormblood, a new expansion for Final Fantasy XIV. However, the game has been plagued with network issues which, according to the Japanese company, has been caused by DDoS attacks from third-parties.
