A FF14 player has purchased billboards in both Texas and California in order to advertise their in-game beach party.
The owners of the FF14 nightclub Rain, live on the Balmung server, have purchased four billboards hoping to attract players of the Final Fantasy MMO to their beach party. As announced on Twitter, two billboards are already live in Austin and Houston, Texas. According to the club’s discord server though two more will go live later today in California.
Club events, such as the beach party, are common in FF14. Much like real club events, they take place every night across the world, with staff paid to host in the in-game currency, gil. These events are streamed on platforms such as Twitch, in order to promote the clubs.
Aside from the Discord and Twitter pages, Rain also has its own website where it promotes upcoming events. Paying out for whole billboards in order to advertise an event from an MMO is fairly irregular though.
While it is not illegal to advertise FF14 parties in the real world – as long as no real money changes hands – there may be some issues from publisher Square Enix. Some of the characters on the club’s website have been created using mods, which goes against the game’s terms of service. The advertising also uses Square Enix’s own characters and properties, presumably without consent.
One of the club’s owners, Revarious, thinks the billboards are more than worth the money. Speaking to GLHF they said, “I giveaway more things to the community off the [in-game store] in two weeks than this whole billboard thing cost us, and we are also still doing all those giveaways at the same time,” they continued, “We just happen to have a lot of very amazing people at Rain where we can do these things and giveaways for the community.”
The timing of the event is perfect for Rain, as the 6.18 patch just dropped allowing players to move between data centers. This means more players will be able to attend the event. You can find out the five biggest changes from the 6.18 patch here.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
