Anyone can now buy FF14’s pizza emote, two years after you had to order $15 of delivery food to get it (maybe)
The most controversial pizza since pineapple
Two years after Final Fantasy XIV launched a pizza-eating emote to a surprising amount of controversy, anyone can pop along to the MMO’s in-game shop and buy it for under a fiver.
The Eat Pizza emote was originally offered exclusively as part of a promotion with US delivery service Grubhub. The deal, launched a few days after the Endwalker expansion, invited players to use a promo code when ordering $15 or more worth of food in return for the emote. As the name suggests, Eat Pizza lets your character, uh, eat pizza.
The promotion quickly descended into chaos, with some players complaining that they had received their code - despite spending several times over the required amount - while others took to sites like eBay to flog the codes they had received for hundreds of dollars. (Thanks, PC Gamer.)
Even Grubhub themselves seemed to get caught up in the confusion, seemingly telling some players that the promotion was a lottery, while others were told it was first come, first served. (Whether or not supplies of the virtual emote were limited was yet another detail nobody seemed to be clear on - the FF14 site implied that codes wouldn’t run out, while Grubhub apparently disagreed.)
Anyway, here we are two years after the pizza kerfuffle, and Square Enix have just stuck the emote on the Final Fantasy XIV online store for $7/£4 - less than half of what you needed to spend with Grubhub to get it in the first place, if you were lucky.
Despite that, the reception among players seems to be largely positive, with even those who missed out on their code at the time or coughed up for some food to get it taking its wider availability in good humour. The prevailing response seems to be requests for other cosmetics limited to promotional events (such as the recent chicken-eating emote available only via KFC Japan) to similarly come to the store down the road.
Until that happens, we won’t know if this is a one-time make-good for this emote’s disastrous release two years ago. At least we’ll be able to eat pizza in the meantime.