its cool how they where able to get these numbers. But they are most likely gonna drop significantly, as it is FFXIV really is to casual of a game, with no content. People have max level'ed every class, it takes like an hour 30 to clear coil with the last boss being a cluster fuck and then your done. 2.1 only gives crystal tower which is a lesser raid that can be cleared in duty finder, this is the period where you will see the numbers drop alot to me.
You know, I really like this game and I'm gonna play it for a long time. But this thread sucks. You took some good news and cheapened it with some childish "in your face" mentality. Grow up. And stop blaming trolls for your own trollish behavior.
^ This.
Sadly agree, there's nothing to gain from trying to rub it in peoples noses. I am glad the game is doing well. I also don't see me leaving the game any time soon, but challenging people in that way doesnt encourage them to give it a chance, its more likely to turn people away.
I see nothing trollish about this personally. It defeats the purpose of having a forum if you are limited to talking about something rather than get excited about it and be able to express it. People need to be a little less sensative. It's not like the OP went and posted "OH YEAH!! THIS GAME IS SO MUCH BETTER THEN EVERYTHING BECAUSE NOW IT HAS 257632573 SUBS!! IN YO FACE!!!"
He/She posted a link and a headline. But people like to argue on this site and try to point out the wrongs of others when we're SUPPOSED to be talking about MMO's. I swear it's like HS in here.
Anyways. I was looking for a good MMO for my GF. She likes gorgeous toons(obviously) and she hates PvP. She's into the whole grouping thing where as I like to solo. So this sounds like it might be a fun choice for her. Whether it's successful by community opinion or not, the true success is having active players who do enjoy it. Tera has a bad rep here and there, less players, F2P, but I've been playing since beta and haven't stopped. But like someone said earlier, we'll see 3-6 months from now.
As reported last week, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn has over 1.5 million registered players worldwide, but naturally this doesn’t mean that all 1.5 million players are actively playing the game. Yoshida provides a little more insight.
“As FFXIV: ARR is a subscription based business model, naturally there will be players who will not play anymore once they finish the main scenario,” he concedes. However, he continues, “MMORPGs that launched after 2008 with a subscription based model retained a maximum of 35% of their users during the first month of subscriptions. However, FFXIV: ARR has surpassed this number by a wide margin.”
If the numbers are impressive why not say the subscription numbers, or the actual retention rate? He obviously has the exact numbers yet is afraid to announce them, did they lose 60% of launch players...63%?. Why even mention them if they are so bad as to keep them hidden? The problem is they don't have many players for a 3 region AAA mmo which cost as much as this did and it's all downhill from here on out, mmos don't build on the first 2 months anymore because the vast majority buy it when it's released and lose interest, there isn't this huge untapped market of mmo players that don't know about xiv. Oh and incase people don't understand "registered accounts" this number will always grow, because quit players are still always registrered even if they never pay or play again, registered accounts has no relevence to subscribed players.
They didn't sell 1.5 million copies because they didn't say that, they said registered accounts which also adds on the v1 players that got the game free. FFXIV v1 sold 630k units and stabalised around 40-50k subscribers. Honestly if you put all the facts together this game isn't doing well at all considering the massive amount of money it's cost to create and the low amount of money they have coming in, cheap boxed sales, cheap subs.
On Pso2 I wish they would bring it to the us/canada in english, its on a indefentie delay atm. Or at least add a english translation to the japanese servers I'd play on those if the text was in english and its not like there is a massive amount to translate in a PSO title. I can kinda see why they are hesitating considering the community hacked psu so much they ended up shutting it down, they probally think there will be a repeat and are deciding if its really worth bringing pso2 stateside.
Well there is an english patch made by fans if you are insterested.
I really tried to like Final Fantasy XIV, I had fun with my Scholar but after my month was up I just could not renew the subscription.
For me it felt like I've played this kind of game before the crafting was good for the game. It felt a little different from other crafting, least in how they handled it. Though it wasn't enough yet to really be a good selling point.
The leveling and questing was the same as others, classes were good.
Just for some reason I lost all interest in it after the month was up.
FFXI is the most profitable game Square ever made. That includes any FF game or other franchise. It has around 500k subscribers for 10 years with peaks around 1.5mil during the first years. This is what FFXIV is aiming for, a constant cash flow from an easy to maintain and expand MMO like FFXI.
If FFXIV falls below these 500k subscriptions on a regular basis people can start calling it a failure, until then it is a success.
FFXI is the most profitable game Square ever made. That includes any FF game or other franchise. It has around 500k subscribers for 10 years with peaks around 1.5mil during the first years. This is what FFXIV is aiming for, a constant cash flow from an easy to maintain and expand MMO like FFXI.
If FFXIV falls below these 500k subscriptions on a regular basis people can start calling it a failure, until then it is a success.
FFXI was profitable because it cost 10 million to create, cost less to run, sold the game full price and had high price subscriptions. FFXIV cost around 100 million to create, sold the game really cheap and has cheap subs. How can a game that cost vastly more and brings in a lot less money for the reasons I mentioned above do what FFXI did on the same number of subscribers. FFXI was profitable for specific reasons, none of which apply and will ever apply to this game.
What you said is like saying you can buy a ferrari because your dad who has a better job than you and bought a cheaper car managed it 10 years ago.
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn has seen an increase of 500 000 accounts since the Tokyo Game Show last month (when it was reported that the amount of accounts was one million).
A massive hit to all the haters around the world, FFXIV:ARR shows strong signs of growth long since the official release has begun. The community waits in anticipation for what excuses the naysayers will think up next.
If they would of said subscribed accounts I would of been impressed. With this PR speak not really, 1.5 million registered accounts for a worldwide MMO isn't that impressive at all, considering most of those have probably long since quit. Phantasy Star Online 2 which is a Japanese only MMO has 1 million registered accounts, and that is a far smaller IP. Heck FFXI probably has 50 million registered accounts lol. Anyway if they really did add that many new players (without losing as many or more) they would of have to of added new servers, which isn't the case. Many of the servers they do have are medium or low population according to the server transfer announcment.
The fact Square keep resorting to PR speak with these announcments leads me to believe the game is underperforming quite badly, there would be no need to resort to what they are doing if it was a genuine success. Given that the PR speak they are putting out isn't that impressive well...speaks volumes.
Yep, it's quite common in PR to push the biggest numbers you can, to show the most success you can.
SE cited FFXI as having 500,000 active players for several years running. Active players says a whole lot more than "registered account", since - as has been pointed out - registered doesn't mean "active". It just means "that many people have, at some point, registered a new account". F2P MMOs love using those numbers, where they're even less meaningful.
When FFXI's population started to decline and the no longer had the 500,000 accounts to show... rather than saying "well now FFXI has 300,000 active accounts" (or whatever the number would have been), they switched over to boasting "2 million characters!". Of course that's not terribly meaningful considering a single account could have 5 characters on it.
300,000 down from 500,000 would look bad; hardly something to brag about. However, 300,000 accounts up to 2,000,000 characters... now that looks impressive! Especially considering few people stop to consider what they're actually saying. Fortunately there are people in this thread who are thoughtful enough to make the distinction that "registered account" =/= "active players".
I've never taken PR as anything but the company taking the numbers they have, picking the most impressive-looking one, and spinning it to make the game look as successful as possible. It is not a definitive indication of a game's health overall.
FFXI is the most profitable game Square ever made. That includes any FF game or other franchise. It has around 500k subscribers for 10 years with peaks around 1.5mil during the first years. This is what FFXIV is aiming for, a constant cash flow from an easy to maintain and expand MMO like FFXI.
If FFXIV falls below these 500k subscriptions on a regular basis people can start calling it a failure, until then it is a success.
FFXI was profitable because it cost 10 million to create, cost less to run, sold the game full price and had high price subscriptions. FFXIV cost around 100 million to create, sold the game really cheap and has cheap subs. How can a game that cost vastly more and brings in a lot less money for the reasons I mentioned above do what FFXI did on the same number of subscribers. FFXI was profitable for specific reasons, none of which apply and will ever apply to this game.
What you said is like saying you can buy a ferrari because your dad who has a better job than you and bought a cheaper car managed it 10 years ago.
500k subscribers are $78 million a year revenue. Do the math before you embarrass yourself.
FFXI is the most profitable game Square ever made. That includes any FF game or other franchise. It has around 500k subscribers for 10 years with peaks around 1.5mil during the first years. This is what FFXIV is aiming for, a constant cash flow from an easy to maintain and expand MMO like FFXI.
If FFXIV falls below these 500k subscriptions on a regular basis people can start calling it a failure, until then it is a success.
FFXI was profitable because it cost 10 million to create, cost less to run, sold the game full price and had high price subscriptions. FFXIV cost around 100 million to create, sold the game really cheap and has cheap subs. How can a game that cost vastly more and brings in a lot less money for the reasons I mentioned above do what FFXI did on the same number of subscribers. FFXI was profitable for specific reasons, none of which apply and will ever apply to this game.
What you said is like saying you can buy a ferrari because your dad who has a better job than you and bought a cheaper car managed it 10 years ago.
500k subscribers are $78 million a year revenue. Do the math before you embarrass yourself.
If only life was so simple, if you want to save some money do you count however much you are paid weekly at the full amount to see how much you can save or take off all the expenses you have first? What about if you were in the position of Square Enix in that the amount of subscribers and money coming in drops every single month also?
I don't want to go too heavily into it but there are far more expenses to setting up an MMO than dev costs (buying the very expensive servers and setting them up) there are weekly running costs like power etc, there is the cost of all the very highly paid staff that run and make patches/customer service/server maintenance staff etc for the game and there is tax ontop of that.
It took FFXI 2 years to become profitable and that was a far far cheaper game to create, 15-20 million development budget. This game cost vastly more to create than that did and has no guarantee to have more players (lower subscription cost and game sale price hurt too). So no, they won't make 78 million a year and have it paid off in 18 months.
FFXI peaked at 500k for a very short amount of time, for most of it's life it was 100-200k subscribers. The biggest problem FFXIV has is that it will be incredibly difficult to keep high player numbers these days (I honestly doubt it has 500k subscribers right now let alone in months and years to come). I don't think many actually realise how hard it is to get 500k subscribers and keep hold of them these days, no MMO since 2008 has managed make enough money from p2p to sustain the game. At best it's used as a start system to relaunch the game a year later as f2p (basically getting 2 bites of the apple). Old MMOs managed it for many reasons, none of those reasons exist today so holding onto that number of players is almost impossible for a new title.
FFXI is the most profitable game Square ever made. That includes any FF game or other franchise. It has around 500k subscribers for 10 years with peaks around 1.5mil during the first years. This is what FFXIV is aiming for, a constant cash flow from an easy to maintain and expand MMO like FFXI.
If FFXIV falls below these 500k subscriptions on a regular basis people can start calling it a failure, until then it is a success.
FFXI was profitable because it cost 10 million to create, cost less to run, sold the game full price and had high price subscriptions. FFXIV cost around 100 million to create, sold the game really cheap and has cheap subs. How can a game that cost vastly more and brings in a lot less money for the reasons I mentioned above do what FFXI did on the same number of subscribers. FFXI was profitable for specific reasons, none of which apply and will ever apply to this game.
What you said is like saying you can buy a ferrari because your dad who has a better job than you and bought a cheaper car managed it 10 years ago.
500k subscribers are $78 million a year revenue. Do the math before you embarrass yourself.
If only life was so simple, if you want to save some money do you count however much you are paid weekly at the full amount to see how much you can save or take off all the expenses you have first? What about if you were in the position of Square Enix in that the amount of subscribers and money coming in drops every single month also?
I don't want to go too heavily into it but there are far more expenses to setting up an MMO than dev costs (buying the very expensive servers and setting them up) there are weekly running costs like power etc, there is the cost of all the very highly paid staff that run and make patches/customer service/server maintenance staff etc for the game and there is tax ontop of that.
It took FFXI 2 years to become profitable and that was a far far cheaper game to create, 15-20 million development budget. This game cost vastly more to create than that did and has no guarantee to have more players (lower subscription cost and game sale price hurt too). So no, they won't make 78 million a year and have it paid off in 18 months.
FFXI peaked at 500k for a very short amount of time, for most of it's life it was 100-200k subscribers. The biggest problem FFXIV has is that it will be incredibly difficult to keep high player numbers these days (I honestly doubt it has 500k subscribers right now let alone in months and years to come). I don't think many actually realise how hard it is to get 500k subscribers and keep hold of them these days, no MMO since 2008 has managed make enough money from p2p to sustain the game. At best it's used as a start system to relaunch the game a year later as f2p (basically getting 2 bites of the apple). Old MMOs managed it for many reasons, none of those reasons exist today so holding onto that number of players is almost impossible for a new title.
Stop embarrassing yourself, you don't know how many subs the game has and you keep speculating and throwing around numbers although you don't know any of the development budgets or server/power costs.
FFXI made $470 million profit in 10 years, that's $47 million a year. I took them 2 years to reach 500k subscribers and has been very steady since with around 350k reported lowest as of 2010. At no time did the subs go to 100-200k.
I never said they pay it off in 18 months but with $78 million a year ( assuming 500k subs) they are positioned very well for the future.
FFXI is the most profitable game Square ever made. That includes any FF game or other franchise. It has around 500k subscribers for 10 years with peaks around 1.5mil during the first years. This is what FFXIV is aiming for, a constant cash flow from an easy to maintain and expand MMO like FFXI.
If FFXIV falls below these 500k subscriptions on a regular basis people can start calling it a failure, until then it is a success.
FFXI was profitable because it cost 10 million to create, cost less to run, sold the game full price and had high price subscriptions. FFXIV cost around 100 million to create, sold the game really cheap and has cheap subs. How can a game that cost vastly more and brings in a lot less money for the reasons I mentioned above do what FFXI did on the same number of subscribers. FFXI was profitable for specific reasons, none of which apply and will ever apply to this game.
What you said is like saying you can buy a ferrari because your dad who has a better job than you and bought a cheaper car managed it 10 years ago.
500k subscribers are $78 million a year revenue. Do the math before you embarrass yourself.
If only life was so simple, if you want to save some money do you count however much you are paid weekly at the full amount to see how much you can save or take off all the expenses you have first? What about if you were in the position of Square Enix in that the amount of subscribers and money coming in drops every single month also?
I don't want to go too heavily into it but there are far more expenses to setting up an MMO than dev costs (buying the very expensive servers and setting them up) there are weekly running costs like power etc, there is the cost of all the very highly paid staff that run and make patches/customer service/server maintenance staff etc for the game and there is tax ontop of that.
It took FFXI 2 years to become profitable and that was a far far cheaper game to create, 15-20 million development budget. This game cost vastly more to create than that did and has no guarantee to have more players (lower subscription cost and game sale price hurt too). So no, they won't make 78 million a year and have it paid off in 18 months.
FFXI peaked at 500k for a very short amount of time, for most of it's life it was 100-200k subscribers. The biggest problem FFXIV has is that it will be incredibly difficult to keep high player numbers these days (I honestly doubt it has 500k subscribers right now let alone in months and years to come). I don't think many actually realise how hard it is to get 500k subscribers and keep hold of them these days, no MMO since 2008 has managed make enough money from p2p to sustain the game. At best it's used as a start system to relaunch the game a year later as f2p (basically getting 2 bites of the apple). Old MMOs managed it for many reasons, none of those reasons exist today so holding onto that number of players is almost impossible for a new title.
Stop embarrassing yourself, you don't know how many subs the game has and you keep speculating and throwing around numbers although you don't know any of the development budgets or server/power costs.
FFXI made $470 million profit in 10 years, that's $47 million a year. I took them 2 years to reach 500k subscribers and has been very steady since with around 350k reported lowest as of 2010. At no time did the subs go to 100-200k.
I never said they pay it off in 18 months but with $78 million a year ( assuming 500k subs) they are positioned very well for the future.
FFXI is an mmo launched at a time when mmo players were loyal to their game long term (it was also very cheap to run because they had a very specific way of creating cheap content patches that really wouldn't be accepted in 2013-2014), the problem with moderm mmos launched after 2008 is there is very little loyalty to them and big name titles coming out cut away large chunks of players, they also get bored very fast. So players leave in large numbers very fast, as was shown in the last Q&A with the developer and pretty much every other mmo that has launched for the last 5 years, Rift, star wars, Aoc, War and Tera etc have all show how hard it is to keep players subscribed. The mmo market since FFXI launched no longer exists and neither do most of the things that worked for that game (it still took them nearly 2 years to make ffxi profitable with it's cheap creation costs btw so with XI player numbers it would still take 5-6 years+).
2008+ mmos have horrible player retention issues and at a point the number of players they manage to hold onto isn't enough to maintain a big development team to create big patches or in some cases to pay back the creation costs (9 years development time is almost twice what most mmos take to create and the developers earn large wages). You don't seem to get that mmos can lose most of their players within 6-12 months, you think Wildstar, PSO2 NA and ESO among others aren't going to decimate XIV player numbers along with the already fast player loss every mmo experiences?
As I said, you talk like holding onto 500-400 thousand subscribers is a given, or that just because ffxi did it ffxiv will automatically do it too. If you can hold onto a large playerbase then of course you can eventually become profitable but the problem is that this game (like star wars) has a massive budget, that big name titles are coming out next year and that player numbers drop off incredibly fast in modern titles.
Reading your post you make it sound like it's a given that any p2p mmo can sustain 500k players, pay off massive costs, pay large dev teams to create content and sustain itself with 78million a year, the history of p2p titles gone f2p shows how wrong that is.
FFXI is the most profitable game Square ever made. That includes any FF game or other franchise. It has around 500k subscribers for 10 years with peaks around 1.5mil during the first years. This is what FFXIV is aiming for, a constant cash flow from an easy to maintain and expand MMO like FFXI.
If FFXIV falls below these 500k subscriptions on a regular basis people can start calling it a failure, until then it is a success.
FFXI was profitable because it cost 10 million to create, cost less to run, sold the game full price and had high price subscriptions. FFXIV cost around 100 million to create, sold the game really cheap and has cheap subs. How can a game that cost vastly more and brings in a lot less money for the reasons I mentioned above do what FFXI did on the same number of subscribers. FFXI was profitable for specific reasons, none of which apply and will ever apply to this game.
What you said is like saying you can buy a ferrari because your dad who has a better job than you and bought a cheaper car managed it 10 years ago.
500k subscribers are $78 million a year revenue. Do the math before you embarrass yourself.
If only life was so simple, if you want to save some money do you count however much you are paid weekly at the full amount to see how much you can save or take off all the expenses you have first? What about if you were in the position of Square Enix in that the amount of subscribers and money coming in drops every single month also?
I don't want to go too heavily into it but there are far more expenses to setting up an MMO than dev costs (buying the very expensive servers and setting them up) there are weekly running costs like power etc, there is the cost of all the very highly paid staff that run and make patches/customer service/server maintenance staff etc for the game and there is tax ontop of that.
It took FFXI 2 years to become profitable and that was a far far cheaper game to create, 15-20 million development budget. This game cost vastly more to create than that did and has no guarantee to have more players (lower subscription cost and game sale price hurt too). So no, they won't make 78 million a year and have it paid off in 18 months.
FFXI peaked at 500k for a very short amount of time, for most of it's life it was 100-200k subscribers. The biggest problem FFXIV has is that it will be incredibly difficult to keep high player numbers these days (I honestly doubt it has 500k subscribers right now let alone in months and years to come). I don't think many actually realise how hard it is to get 500k subscribers and keep hold of them these days, no MMO since 2008 has managed make enough money from p2p to sustain the game. At best it's used as a start system to relaunch the game a year later as f2p (basically getting 2 bites of the apple). Old MMOs managed it for many reasons, none of those reasons exist today so holding onto that number of players is almost impossible for a new title.
Stop embarrassing yourself, you don't know how many subs the game has and you keep speculating and throwing around numbers although you don't know any of the development budgets or server/power costs.
FFXI made $470 million profit in 10 years, that's $47 million a year. I took them 2 years to reach 500k subscribers and has been very steady since with around 350k reported lowest as of 2010. At no time did the subs go to 100-200k.
I never said they pay it off in 18 months but with $78 million a year ( assuming 500k subs) they are positioned very well for the future.
FFXI is an mmo launched at a time when mmo players were loyal to their game long term (it was also very cheap to run because they had a very specific way of creating cheap content patches that really wouldn't be accepted in 2013-2014), the problem with moderm mmos launched after 2008 is there is very little loyalty to them and big name titles coming out cut away large chunks of players, they also get bored very fast. So players leave in large numbers very fast, as was shown in the last Q&A with the developer and pretty much every other mmo that has launched for the last 5 years, Rift, star wars, Aoc, War and Tera etc have all show how hard it is to keep players subscribed. The mmo market since FFXI launched no longer exists and neither do most of the things that worked for that game (it still took them nearly 2 years to make ffxi profitable with it's cheap creation costs btw so with XI player numbers it would still take 5-6 years+).
Stop making shit up, it took them 5 years to become profitable, see my source below.
"The game [FFXI] cost two to three billion yen (~$17–25 million) to create along with the PlayOnline Network Service and was assumed to become profitable over a five-year timespan." [source]
2008+ mmos have horrible player retention issues and at a point the number of players they manage to hold onto isn't enough to maintain a big development team to create big patches or in some cases to pay back the creation costs (9 years development time is almost twice what most mmos take to create and the developers earn large wages). You don't seem to get that mmos can lose most of their players within 6-12 months, you think Wildstar, PSO2 NA and ESO among others aren't going to decimate XIV player numbers along with the already fast player loss every mmo experiences?
It's fair to assume that FFXIV will perform similar to FFXI because you have the same brand loyalty to the FF series and the market is now bigger. The global market size for MMOs in 2006 was $3 billion in 2012 it was $13 billion.
FFXI sold around 200k units in its first year at a time where other game moved 2 million units per year. FFXIV already sold 1.5 million units at a time where other games sell 10 million units. It's pretty much the same ratio.
As I said, you talk like holding onto 500-400 thousand subscribers is a given, or that just because ffxi did it ffxiv will automatically do it too. If you can hold onto a large playerbase then of course you can eventually become profitable but the problem is that this game (like star wars) has a massive budget, that big name titles are coming out next year and that player numbers drop off incredibly fast in modern titles.
Reading your post you make it sound like it's a given that any p2p mmo can sustain 500k players, pay off massive costs, pay large dev teams to create content and sustain itself with 78million a year, the history of p2p titles gone f2p shows how wrong that is.
"In 2006, between 200,000 and 300,000 active players logged in per day, and the game was the dominant MMORPG in Japan.[source] In 2008 Square Enix noted that Final Fantasy XI had a strong user base of around 500,000 subscribers,[source] and in April 2009, announced that the total number of active characters exceeded 2 million for the first time.[source] Square Enix president Yoichi Wada announced in June 2012 that Final Fantasy XI had become the most profitable title in the Final Fantasyseries.[source]"
I am tired of arguing with you since you just make stuff up and your arguments are all silly. I am done, you can dig deeper though if you like.
You're so set on proving me wrong on anything that you lost sight of the original point.
My argument was that FFXI cost 20-25million to create and had 200 thousand players took 2 years to make a profit and that was a long time.
Your argument is that FFXI actually had 500 thousand players and took 5 years to make a profit.
Thanks for making my argument stronger I guess? FFXIV cost vaslty more to make than FFXI and so will take vastly longer than 5 years if it even manages to keep that many players according to what you just said.
As I said FFXI had very specific reasons it was successful for so long, the fact that game was successful has almost no relevance towards FFXIV because it was during a time when gamers were loyal to their mmo in big numbers, had game mechanics that forced you to play years to accomplish anything and most importantly this game is nothing like FFXI anyway. FFXIV is more like WoW than FFXI and every mmo since 2008 which has been more like WoW than anything else are all f2p now due to heavy player loss. If brand loyalty meant as much as you say it does and meant more than lack of content, bad community and all the other problems why did FFXIV v1 peak at tens of thousands of players and fail completely?
Nobody would argue FFXI was a great and successful game, this isn't FFXI though and shares almost nothing in common with it.
It doesn't matter how good a game does.l or doesn't do. People who don't like the game will always argue that the numbers are misleading or something that supports their opinion the game is bad and failed.
On that same note the fans of a game will always argue it's doing well and it's always busy or whatever backs up their opinion.
Rift was the grand champion of the P2P model right up until it went F2P.
It is VERY good for the industry ,even if you don't like the game because Square is one of the biggest developers out there with the ability to make an impact in this genre.
Again you might not like the game but i know from my days in FFXI,Square did a really good job creating content and that with far less than 1 million players.
The problem still exists however and that is greed atop the food chain.This game lost multi millions so far in investment and then fixing the game,it will take years to recover it and then finally start turning a profit.Until that profit margin begins they "might" keyword might not give it their best effort ,still trying to recoup losses.
I can point again to FFXI,that game made them a lot of money and has/had a loyal following yet as the population lately decreased and trying to help support FFXIV via FFXI they made their cheapest expansion ever.For the first time they created buildings with no insides,simple lazy 2D structures to fill in space,that really disappointed me.Point is sure they gave it a really good effort to get this game back,but i will not trust them just yet because they were forced to get this game back in order.
Another valid point is that Yoshi had stated he needed 2 years to get this game where he wanted but they gave him less than one year,so again you can see the PUSH fro ma top the food chain.As long as the greedy blind CEO/board members continue to push profits without a vision to the future,they will hold their games back.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Comments
I see nothing trollish about this personally. It defeats the purpose of having a forum if you are limited to talking about something rather than get excited about it and be able to express it. People need to be a little less sensative. It's not like the OP went and posted "OH YEAH!! THIS GAME IS SO MUCH BETTER THEN EVERYTHING BECAUSE NOW IT HAS 257632573 SUBS!! IN YO FACE!!!"
He/She posted a link and a headline. But people like to argue on this site and try to point out the wrongs of others when we're SUPPOSED to be talking about MMO's. I swear it's like HS in here.
Anyways. I was looking for a good MMO for my GF. She likes gorgeous toons(obviously) and she hates PvP. She's into the whole grouping thing where as I like to solo. So this sounds like it might be a fun choice for her. Whether it's successful by community opinion or not, the true success is having active players who do enjoy it. Tera has a bad rep here and there, less players, F2P, but I've been playing since beta and haven't stopped. But like someone said earlier, we'll see 3-6 months from now.
Getting too old for this $&17!
I don't understand all this half boasting.
If the numbers are impressive why not say the subscription numbers, or the actual retention rate? He obviously has the exact numbers yet is afraid to announce them, did they lose 60% of launch players...63%?. Why even mention them if they are so bad as to keep them hidden? The problem is they don't have many players for a 3 region AAA mmo which cost as much as this did and it's all downhill from here on out, mmos don't build on the first 2 months anymore because the vast majority buy it when it's released and lose interest, there isn't this huge untapped market of mmo players that don't know about xiv. Oh and incase people don't understand "registered accounts" this number will always grow, because quit players are still always registrered even if they never pay or play again, registered accounts has no relevence to subscribed players.
They didn't sell 1.5 million copies because they didn't say that, they said registered accounts which also adds on the v1 players that got the game free. FFXIV v1 sold 630k units and stabalised around 40-50k subscribers. Honestly if you put all the facts together this game isn't doing well at all considering the massive amount of money it's cost to create and the low amount of money they have coming in, cheap boxed sales, cheap subs.
Well there is an english patch made by fans if you are insterested.
I really tried to like Final Fantasy XIV, I had fun with my Scholar but after my month was up I just could not renew the subscription.
For me it felt like I've played this kind of game before the crafting was good for the game. It felt a little different from other crafting, least in how they handled it. Though it wasn't enough yet to really be a good selling point.
The leveling and questing was the same as others, classes were good.
Just for some reason I lost all interest in it after the month was up.
FFXI is the most profitable game Square ever made. That includes any FF game or other franchise. It has around 500k subscribers for 10 years with peaks around 1.5mil during the first years. This is what FFXIV is aiming for, a constant cash flow from an easy to maintain and expand MMO like FFXI.
If FFXIV falls below these 500k subscriptions on a regular basis people can start calling it a failure, until then it is a success.
FFXI was profitable because it cost 10 million to create, cost less to run, sold the game full price and had high price subscriptions. FFXIV cost around 100 million to create, sold the game really cheap and has cheap subs. How can a game that cost vastly more and brings in a lot less money for the reasons I mentioned above do what FFXI did on the same number of subscribers. FFXI was profitable for specific reasons, none of which apply and will ever apply to this game.
What you said is like saying you can buy a ferrari because your dad who has a better job than you and bought a cheaper car managed it 10 years ago.
Yep, it's quite common in PR to push the biggest numbers you can, to show the most success you can.
SE cited FFXI as having 500,000 active players for several years running. Active players says a whole lot more than "registered account", since - as has been pointed out - registered doesn't mean "active". It just means "that many people have, at some point, registered a new account". F2P MMOs love using those numbers, where they're even less meaningful.
When FFXI's population started to decline and the no longer had the 500,000 accounts to show... rather than saying "well now FFXI has 300,000 active accounts" (or whatever the number would have been), they switched over to boasting "2 million characters!". Of course that's not terribly meaningful considering a single account could have 5 characters on it.
300,000 down from 500,000 would look bad; hardly something to brag about. However, 300,000 accounts up to 2,000,000 characters... now that looks impressive! Especially considering few people stop to consider what they're actually saying. Fortunately there are people in this thread who are thoughtful enough to make the distinction that "registered account" =/= "active players".
I've never taken PR as anything but the company taking the numbers they have, picking the most impressive-looking one, and spinning it to make the game look as successful as possible. It is not a definitive indication of a game's health overall.
That goes for FFXIV, or any other MMO.
It's the same crap for every game. Don't any of you get tired of this?
500k subscribers are $78 million a year revenue. Do the math before you embarrass yourself.
If only life was so simple, if you want to save some money do you count however much you are paid weekly at the full amount to see how much you can save or take off all the expenses you have first? What about if you were in the position of Square Enix in that the amount of subscribers and money coming in drops every single month also?
I don't want to go too heavily into it but there are far more expenses to setting up an MMO than dev costs (buying the very expensive servers and setting them up) there are weekly running costs like power etc, there is the cost of all the very highly paid staff that run and make patches/customer service/server maintenance staff etc for the game and there is tax ontop of that.
It took FFXI 2 years to become profitable and that was a far far cheaper game to create, 15-20 million development budget. This game cost vastly more to create than that did and has no guarantee to have more players (lower subscription cost and game sale price hurt too). So no, they won't make 78 million a year and have it paid off in 18 months.
FFXI peaked at 500k for a very short amount of time, for most of it's life it was 100-200k subscribers. The biggest problem FFXIV has is that it will be incredibly difficult to keep high player numbers these days (I honestly doubt it has 500k subscribers right now let alone in months and years to come). I don't think many actually realise how hard it is to get 500k subscribers and keep hold of them these days, no MMO since 2008 has managed make enough money from p2p to sustain the game. At best it's used as a start system to relaunch the game a year later as f2p (basically getting 2 bites of the apple). Old MMOs managed it for many reasons, none of those reasons exist today so holding onto that number of players is almost impossible for a new title.
Stop embarrassing yourself, you don't know how many subs the game has and you keep speculating and throwing around numbers although you don't know any of the development budgets or server/power costs.
FFXI made $470 million profit in 10 years, that's $47 million a year. I took them 2 years to reach 500k subscribers and has been very steady since with around 350k reported lowest as of 2010. At no time did the subs go to 100-200k.
I never said they pay it off in 18 months but with $78 million a year ( assuming 500k subs) they are positioned very well for the future.
FFXI is an mmo launched at a time when mmo players were loyal to their game long term (it was also very cheap to run because they had a very specific way of creating cheap content patches that really wouldn't be accepted in 2013-2014), the problem with moderm mmos launched after 2008 is there is very little loyalty to them and big name titles coming out cut away large chunks of players, they also get bored very fast. So players leave in large numbers very fast, as was shown in the last Q&A with the developer and pretty much every other mmo that has launched for the last 5 years, Rift, star wars, Aoc, War and Tera etc have all show how hard it is to keep players subscribed. The mmo market since FFXI launched no longer exists and neither do most of the things that worked for that game (it still took them nearly 2 years to make ffxi profitable with it's cheap creation costs btw so with XI player numbers it would still take 5-6 years+).
2008+ mmos have horrible player retention issues and at a point the number of players they manage to hold onto isn't enough to maintain a big development team to create big patches or in some cases to pay back the creation costs (9 years development time is almost twice what most mmos take to create and the developers earn large wages). You don't seem to get that mmos can lose most of their players within 6-12 months, you think Wildstar, PSO2 NA and ESO among others aren't going to decimate XIV player numbers along with the already fast player loss every mmo experiences?
As I said, you talk like holding onto 500-400 thousand subscribers is a given, or that just because ffxi did it ffxiv will automatically do it too. If you can hold onto a large playerbase then of course you can eventually become profitable but the problem is that this game (like star wars) has a massive budget, that big name titles are coming out next year and that player numbers drop off incredibly fast in modern titles.
Reading your post you make it sound like it's a given that any p2p mmo can sustain 500k players, pay off massive costs, pay large dev teams to create content and sustain itself with 78million a year, the history of p2p titles gone f2p shows how wrong that is.
"In 2006, between 200,000 and 300,000 active players logged in per day, and the game was the dominant MMORPG in Japan.[source] In 2008 Square Enix noted that Final Fantasy XI had a strong user base of around 500,000 subscribers,[source] and in April 2009, announced that the total number of active characters exceeded 2 million for the first time.[source] Square Enix president Yoichi Wada announced in June 2012 that Final Fantasy XI had become the most profitable title in the Final Fantasyseries.[source]"
I am tired of arguing with you since you just make stuff up and your arguments are all silly. I am done, you can dig deeper though if you like.
Have a nice day.
You're so set on proving me wrong on anything that you lost sight of the original point.
My argument was that FFXI cost 20-25million to create and had 200 thousand players took 2 years to make a profit and that was a long time.
Your argument is that FFXI actually had 500 thousand players and took 5 years to make a profit.
Thanks for making my argument stronger I guess? FFXIV cost vaslty more to make than FFXI and so will take vastly longer than 5 years if it even manages to keep that many players according to what you just said.
As I said FFXI had very specific reasons it was successful for so long, the fact that game was successful has almost no relevance towards FFXIV because it was during a time when gamers were loyal to their mmo in big numbers, had game mechanics that forced you to play years to accomplish anything and most importantly this game is nothing like FFXI anyway. FFXIV is more like WoW than FFXI and every mmo since 2008 which has been more like WoW than anything else are all f2p now due to heavy player loss. If brand loyalty meant as much as you say it does and meant more than lack of content, bad community and all the other problems why did FFXIV v1 peak at tens of thousands of players and fail completely?
Nobody would argue FFXI was a great and successful game, this isn't FFXI though and shares almost nothing in common with it.
On that same note the fans of a game will always argue it's doing well and it's always busy or whatever backs up their opinion.
Rift was the grand champion of the P2P model right up until it went F2P.
It is VERY good for the industry ,even if you don't like the game because Square is one of the biggest developers out there with the ability to make an impact in this genre.
Again you might not like the game but i know from my days in FFXI,Square did a really good job creating content and that with far less than 1 million players.
The problem still exists however and that is greed atop the food chain.This game lost multi millions so far in investment and then fixing the game,it will take years to recover it and then finally start turning a profit.Until that profit margin begins they "might" keyword might not give it their best effort ,still trying to recoup losses.
I can point again to FFXI,that game made them a lot of money and has/had a loyal following yet as the population lately decreased and trying to help support FFXIV via FFXI they made their cheapest expansion ever.For the first time they created buildings with no insides,simple lazy 2D structures to fill in space,that really disappointed me.Point is sure they gave it a really good effort to get this game back,but i will not trust them just yet because they were forced to get this game back in order.
Another valid point is that Yoshi had stated he needed 2 years to get this game where he wanted but they gave him less than one year,so again you can see the PUSH fro ma top the food chain.As long as the greedy blind CEO/board members continue to push profits without a vision to the future,they will hold their games back.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.