Under mounting pressure from players, Square Enix finally gave in in April 2022. Goodbye sleepless nights and frantic clicking: a lottery system was introduced. Five days to enter, a random draw, no more endless waiting in front of a placard. In theory, a fair solution. In practice, nothing changes. The shortage stays exactly the same.

Worse, the launch turned into a farce. A major bug turned the experience into a lottery with no winners. Hundreds of plots sat mysteriously empty, and players discovered they had lost to a phantom winning entry, number 0. On social media, the affair was dubbed 0gate. Absurd screenshots piled up: dozens of entrants, no winner. Fortunes in Gil frozen in the void.

Yoshida stepped in urgently. Three statements in a few days. A grave tone, official apologies.

The message: the team understood this was a major problem.

For more than a week, the results were frozen. In the end, Square Enix fixed the bug and handed the plots to the rightful winners, refunding everyone else.

But the lottery solves nothing. It only makes the inequality more visible. In the first draws, some plots attracted more than 1,000 entrants. Odds of success: less than 0.1%. Odds worthy of a national lottery, except that here the prize isn’t a cash jackpot, just a few pixels of land.

Hiro, who owns a mansion in Shirogane, tells me he doesn’t see the problem. It’s a game, he says: if everyone had a house, it wouldn’t be a goal any more, and people value what is rare.

Yuki, who lives in Empyreum, concedes that houses are rare, but says that is exactly what makes them precious. She lost 15 lotteries before winning her plot and, frankly, she says, that makes it even more special.

An unforgiving logic: scarcity creates value. But the mechanism is rigged. In Final Fantasy XIV, the lottery merely shares out an artificial shortage. Exactly as in the real world, where public policy strains to help buyers without ever touching the root cause: deliberately restricted supply.