After what seems like an eternity, Square Enix has announced that they will resume the distribution and sales digitally for Final Fantasy XIV at the end of this month. Specifically revealed by Producer Naoki Yoshida, stated that the game will be available to buy digitally once again on January 25 for most regions around the world. This will also be the same day that the company’s new data center will go online, supplying players with a plethora of new servers to use in the ever growing MMORPG.
Yoshida also mentioned in his update that the Oceana region (New Zealand and Australia) will be getting their own major servers to boot and will also go live on the same day. This was being done because of the high amount of ping and traffic, which lead them to try and log into Japanese and American servers, which in an of itself created a bigger issue. Yoshida states that those who are in the Oceana region are encouraged to migrate their characters to the new servers. As a bonus, Square Enix will waive the world transfer fee for those who do make the move.
This entire situation came about in the past Summer when nearly all online digital retailers “sold out” of the online MMORPG. This created further buzz for the then-upcoming expansion Endwalker, which was already hyped at an all time high. When the expansion did release, it created actual chaos for every single server in the game. Players reportedly could not log on, and if they were able to get in, the wait lines to enter a server was potentially hundreds of hours. Due to so much server congestion, Yoshida and Square Enix had no choice but to halt online distribution of the title, for anyone that wanted to get into the game for the first time would not be able to even enter a world.