Bitmob.com

THANK.
GOD.

that Sins of a Solar Empire has sold nearly 1 million copies on a budget of under 1 million dollars, and that Starcraft II sold 1.5 million copies in 2 days, just to reinforce my hopeful belief that there really are gamers without ADD in the world these days."

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2855/15

"There’s really no way to sugar-coat this, so we won’t: the performance of the GT 220 is abysmal. Or rather, the pricing is."

I'd be surprised if even World of Warcraft runs decently on that card on anything but the lowest-end settings.

You may not have meant your article to focus on system specs, but in this case, system specs are *EVERYTHING*.  You made extremely misinformed assumptions about FF XIV based on very low-end hardware that Square shouldn't even worry about in the first place.  The GT 220 is not representative of hardware that practically any gamers running FF XIV will have in the first place.

Heck, I'd wager that even the very-successful FFXI would have trouble running on a GT 220.

The GT 220 is found for less than $70.  For just over $100, instead, you could have multiple times faster performance.

I realize that doing research on proper PC gaming parts is one of the barriers of entry to PC gaming, but so is buying the right TV for your new console, or heck, even researching the best couch for planting your butt on.  Buying the GT 220 is one of the worst hardware decisions possible to make, and no more than 5-10 minutes browsing around or asking the friendly people of Bitmob would have told you that.

I get that your article is supposed to be about what the mainstream audience might have, and how that mainstream hardware might affect the quality and sales of FF XIV.  However, you're severely misinformed if you think the GT 220 is at all representative for what hardware that potential customers of the game might have.  Yeah, WoW is an exception, but it's a nearly needless exception these days.  Tens of millions of gamers have exponentially faster GPUs these days than the GT 220.  Heck, probably 100+ million do.

You say that your system is "6 months old", but you're running a GPU that is many many many times slower, exponentially slower, than a $150-200 GPU from 3-4 years ago.  "

Look - all of these cards have 1GB of ram on them, which is helpful for doing things like GPU-accelerated video decoding and other such home theater PC tasks, but none of them are remotely capable when it comes to actually running games:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007709+4025+600007779&QksAutoSuggestion=&ShowDeactivatedMark=False&Configurator=&IsNodeId=1&Subcategory=48&description=&Ntk=&CFG=&SpeTabStoreType=&srchInDesc=

I haven't actually run the FFXIV benchmark yet, but I can't imagine it's so demanding that a decently capable $150-250 GPU from the last few years could easily run it well..."