The point I was making is that FFXI player accounts make up a significant addition to FFXIV's overall player numbers and profits for PR and financial presentations, there is no argument here. This is a fact, this would be like Blizzard buying Eve Online and secretly adding their players numbers and profits to wow and saying it wouldn't matter. Of course it would, there will always be a benefit in this kind of tactic.

I made the comparison to Steam and indeed PS4 because I knew they were comparable and I knew your pride would force you to say one doesn't actually matter to "XIV" as an entity and not say the same about the other two (aka if XI doesn't matter to the total then neither does steam).

It also helped XIV claim the PR award of being "the most profitable FF title" much sooner because they stopped counting XI profits when ARR launched and they forced us all to be merged with XIV account systems (if you check the places that calculate these things, you will see they magically stopped counting XI revenue when they stopped appearing on financial reports after ARR...cause they merged XI profits into XIV). This is like going into a race and taking the leader, and forcing him to move behind the runner up and push him so he can win and then shouting how amazing it is the runner up won gold.

Again I'm not saying XIV does not have more players than XI, I'm not saying XIV isn't successful and I'm also fully aware that being useful to XIV is a benefit to us. What I'm saying is XIV wants and needs XI players numbers to add to its own for PR and financial report reasons and they would not want to lose all steam players or all XI players equally.

If you can't accept XIV operations value XI for numerous financial and pr reasons, you're purely arguing form a position of fanboy pride.

Since you play both and are fully aware XI and XIV have been merged I'm not sure why you're even arguing at all.