The director of Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn MMO Naoki Yoshida has said that multiplayer games like Overwatch and Fortnite aren't a threat to his title.

Speaking to Eurogamer, the developer was asked for his thoughts on these new service-based multiplayer games, with Yoshida saying that Final Fantasy XIV is different enough from these newer and more flashy titles that there isn't much danger of them stealing the MMO's audience.

He did say, however, that if A Realm Reborn's audience did start to skew to this younger demographic that likes a different style of game that he may need to start to cater in that direction.

"This is happening because the video game industry continuously evolves. Just taking this example, traditional JRPGs are based on turn-based games," he said.

"And especially for the youth, they feel that it's quite outdated, they don't really understand.. Talking about the younger generation, someone up to the age of 25, because prior to the time they were born, there was relatively high-spec hardware for their gaming experiences - their character is rendered very realistically and they can actually control the characters directly - by pressing one button, the character will punch the enemies or fire the gun...

"That's why we don't feel those types of games are a threat because the basic game is designed completely differently. Because the audience that's playing Overwatch and Fortnite are probably in their 20s, they're a younger audience. If that younger audience becomes our main audience for FF14 or our current MMORPG, then we may need to cater to that new audience and create the excitement that they want from a game. We feel that FF14 doesn't really need to play that role. It should be the next generation of MMOs. But if we want to make an MMO which doesn't require targeting, that would be really difficult. We'd probably need to make some drastic changes to the game where there are text chats, but people are using voice chat and you can choose your play style, you can quit anything, you can come back any time... That kind of generation and time will definitely come, but personally speaking it looks very difficult so I don't want to do it!"