I am not even sure what prompted me to buy it. Think I was merely in a gamestop and was like "hey, i'm getting this because I said so." 5-6 years later....
Now this is a touching subject. I dont think that ffxi will ever go away. Im sure SE will bring it down to 1 server and just leave in powered on in a closet somwhere before that happens. But I believe we still have a long way to go before even that happens. But hay,, thats my 2 cents on that.
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I don't see that happening. FF is the company's bread and butter. They aren't going to let anyone use any part of the property it without properly licensing it, and paying through the nose.
On the bright side, the only MMOs that have shut down, were flops from the beginning, or intentionally sabotaged by their owners (see Neverwinter Nights, and The Shadow of Yserbius, both of which were destroyed by AOL out of spite). The Realm Online is still up. UO is still up. Everquest is still up. Asheron's Call, Lineage, RO, DAOC, Anarchy Online, all still up. These sorts of games have incredibly long lifespans, and I don't see any reason FFXI will be any different. Besides possibly Lineage, FFXI probably has the healthiest populations of all of the aging MMOs.
100,000(players) x 13(monthly fee) = 1.3 million dollars a month. I'd keep it running for that amount of money coming in and population is at least triple that right now. I think we're good for awhile.
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What? Even if we assume 100,000 Content ID's at $12.95 per ID then that is approximately $15M USD in recurring income. Their 12/31/10 Annual Report puts their company recurring income at $75.5M USD
Moreover, there was a decrease of 70.9% in recurring income year-over-year from 12/31/09 to 12/31/10. There was a decline of 76.6% in Net Income from that same period.
Those of you who think that shutting down FFXI forever would cripple or even bankrupt Square Enix are fooling themselves into a false sense of security.
I wouldn't call 20% of their recurring income their "bread and butter."
He meant Final Fantasy in general, not just FFXI.
edit: I also don't understand how you got 15 million from 100,000*12.95.
edit2: nvm. Annually, you mean.
only way i could ever see it going offline would be to just completely remake the game from the ground up. you'd prolly make 3 characters and it would prolly be storyline based like all other final fantasies. This would be a lot to do and SE would only do this if they were sure it will sell well. it would be really nice to have actually.
FFXI was my first MMORPG and i tell you it wouldnt bother me in the slightest if FFXIV ended up being a total ripoff of ffxi with major improvement on graphics, i hope it doesnt end however as servers close and get consolodated its just like stores, they close and the pool gets smaller and smaller and eventually its gonna end. But i hope they at least wait until a decent ffxiv version is around so we can have something to move to.
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