Square Enix just halted digital download sales of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn in order to avoid further congestion of the servers due to unexpectedly heavy traffic while they are planning to launch new servers, but just how about the heavy traffic?
The suspension of digital sales was decided in order to prioritize the quality of the experience of players that already purchased the game, and is of course just a temporary solution while more servers are deployed and the login capacity of each server is increased. The development team expects to be able to improve server capacity significantly in both the Japanese and North American/European data centers.

The publisher just sent in a press release giving some numbers for us to crunch. After launch concurrent connections have reached a record number of 187,000 players connected at the same time (the previous record for a game operated by a Japanese company was 150,000 during the open beta of A Realm Reborn), and Square Enix expects that the numbers will grow further and will reach 200,000 in the near future. It’s notable that a MMORPG overtaking just after launch the numbers of its free open beta is a quite spectacular result.
It is estimated that the operation will be finished atthe beginning of next week, when digital sales will resume. And the exact date will be announced in later time. The retail version of the game and players who already purchased the downloadable version will not be influenced by the suspension of sales.Furthermore,they can also buy FFXIV Gil to sustain the game playing.
In addtion,if you want to know more on Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn,you can check out the interview with Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida filmed recently at Gamescom.