Final Fantasy XIV's new Endwalker DLC is so popular that the game's director Naoki Yoshida announced on Wednesday that they are suspending sales of the game until player populations go down. The servers are facing too much congestion to add any more players, a good problem to have for Square Enix. The DLC completes the current leg of the Final Fantasy XIV story and has been highly anticipated over the past few months.

Yoshida stated in a new blog post: "Players are currently experiencing extremely long wait times due to the dense concentration of play hours which far exceed our server capacity, especially during the peak times, and so we have decided to temporarily suspend the sale and delivery of FINAL FANTASY XIV Starter Edition and Complete Edition. Additionally, although those with an active subscription are prioritized to log in, Free Trial players are unable to log in outside of late night and early morning hours, and so we will also temporarily suspend new registrations for the Free Trial."

On top of that, subscribed players are being offered additional game time compensation as an apology for the server issues. Devs previously granted 7 days of game time, but they will not be offering 14 days. 

Yoshida also addressed the now infamous Error 2002, which has been kicking players from login queues on occasion and causing frustrations for players who are trying to queue. According to Yoshida, this is a bug that has now been identified, but he stated that they will not be able to push the fix for it until Dec. 21st with Patch 6.01. 

Yoshida confirmed that they are still working toward building new servers to accommodate the surge in players, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused significnat supply shortages for semi-conductor chips, making it difficult for them to complete these projects. He said we can expect a roadmap for this project by the end of January 2022.

Final Fantasy XIV has had a tremendous year, rocketing in popularity to over 25 million registered players, even as interest in World of Warcraft waned in the wake of Activision Blizzard's many scandals. Endwalker has further bolstered interest in the MMORPG title, bringing in waves and waves of players who want to complete the game's main storyline. While it is not ideal that the game is no longer selling new copies, the reason they are not selling them is that it is so popular they can't add more players, even if they wanted to.