FFXIV was never a recovery for Final Fantasy. When FF7 came out, every gamer knew Final Fantasy, and there was a new mainline Final Fantasy game coming out every year for 5 years straight. It was inescapable. Fast forward to the 2010s and now the 2020s, where now many gamers do not know what Final Fantasy is let alone have played one. A new mainline game comes out once every 7 years, is only talked about 30 to 40 year old millennials and Gen Ys, and is then overall forgotten while gamers look forward to the next Genshin or GTA or Elden Ring or whatever. FF14 prior to ShB was an under the radar MMO, in a genre where the king had already fallen out of the gaming consciousness after Cataclysm. You had to be hardcore into MMOs to know about FF14. Aka, not kids. ShB briefly made FF14 attract some people from the anime/JRPG/visual novel fandoms but still was nowhere near on the same scale of popularity in gaming as late 90s/early 2000s Final Fantasy was. The main story ended that group left and subs plummeted. So Square has churned through their new players and back at square 1 with an aging playerbase and no incoming newblood to replace leavers.
FF14 was at a time massive and considering it's roommates (FF11, FF12, FF13, FF15, and FF16) it's not hard to see why. FFXIV 2.0 was a huge shock to the entire gaming sphere - and there's tons of FFXIV merch, games, a fucking documentary, a Netflix series, and so on. It was a risky investment that made so much money it in essence it saved the entire company. Even if people don't play it, it's one of the more well known games in recent history. Yes, it isn't Fortnite or GTA5 - but to pretend that people don't know FFXIV or FF in general is a bit of a stretch.
It's also not just Final Fantasy having issues - people were pretty milquetoast on the last Kingdom Hearts, Tactics is only getting remakes, Foamstars died, Forspoken is a meme, and Dragon Quest is Dragon Quest. The entire company really needs to figure out what it's doing and figure it out fast, because FFXIV isn't going to be a money printer forever.
I am slowly coming around to the idea that FFXIV needs to be put into maintenance mode like 11 and make 17 the new shiny MMO and give everything a fresh start; no more being bound by 1.0 engine limitations, no more being bound by Jenga tier coding that legitimately no one on that team knows how to do anymore (chocobo racing). It lets the developers to be allowed to stretch their creative muscles and give them a blank canvas to paint upon.
Yeah - not to mention that FFXIV released on the
Playstation 3 - which I know they've phased out from a CPU/Memory perspective, but the engine they'd be able to build targeting either PS5 (and similar CPUs) or Next Gen would be able to realize a roughly 3000% power increase from that jump alone.
They've also pigeonholed themselves with balance and having too many jobs - a lot of jobs are just "other job with -mechanic-". It would be funny if they Did FFXIV - 3.0 Part 2, A reborn realm reborn instead of FF17/FF18 though.