How long do we have left?

[Swords]

Hate to nitpick but its not subscribers, its characters.

Still though with the catastrophic failure that FFXIV was I believe alot of people have come back that quit forever. God knows I keep getting bugged from people coming back who gave me all there stuff thinking they would never be back.

Blizzard uses the same methods for counting WoW subscribers, they use it as a draw to attract people with the thought "Hey alot of people play this, it must be a good game". Now how many of those 6 million players thay have stickerd on the box are actually mules. If I had to give an honest guess, at least 3/4 of their claimed playerbase.

To address the concerns over the server merges, I would not doubt that SE merged the servers in order to cut maintence costs and with periodic upgrades the servers were probably improved to where they could handle a greater capacity of players.

As far as FFXI being on it's last legs people have been saying that since ToAU had finished. Four years, one expansion and six mini-expansions later FFXI is still here, still has at least another few years of planned content left in it.

[Savanah]

If a weekend late prime-time PST is any indication on Leviathan, FFXI is still going strong. I've seen in excess of 3700 players on at times. That's a really good number.

[Dreimar]

3700 ?!? Eekk too many! You shoulda toss some thousand down from airship into the sea
Seriously, i didnt see any lack of players on Sylph , over 1.5k on working days , 2.5k on weekends

[HFX7686]

I don't think that SE would trot out the Abyssea expansions and then this nice shiny forum only to shut the game down in a few months. People truly underestimate the finances of a pay-to-play game online. There are still pay-to-play games from the late 80s (old text based MUDs) that are still running today as pay-to-play. The costs of running a couple of servers and maintenance on those servers without expansions/development/updates is only a few hundred subscribers. As long as people pay, they will keep it running.

Personally, I think the game deserves a complete graphics overhaul like I think Ultima Online did a few years ago. Hopefully they'll finally ditch PS2 support (or just not do the graphics overhaul for the PS2) and really spruce up this game a bunch. It'd be nice.

[ReplicaX]

It seems XI is the life line with the trend of XIV. The stock holders alone are upset with XIV besides the gamers. I would love to see XI upgraded to XIV's engine and if the PS2 player base is still high then retain them on their own servers with the option of PC/360 users as well.

There are many XI users including myself that upgraded their PCs for XIV as well. With an upgraded XI these current PS2 limitations can go away and provide SE with more content options, jobs, etc to keep the subscriber rate going.

[ringthree]

The posters in all threads about the future of FFXI (or any MMO for that matter) are always the same:

1. The people that understand the economics of an MMO, and realize that once they are launched and production costs are recouped they basically become a huge cash cow even at very low player levels.

2. The people that use no logic and have no understanding of that situation and claim that it will die tomorrow because their buddy George quit last week and now they feel like quitting.

[Unaisis]

FF11 wont die ^.^

[Lutschfactor]

game wont die anytime in the near future. everquest has been online what 20 if not close to it years. look for ffxi to run another good 5-6 years b4 maybe small issue come up. only reason wow does better. coz its a kids game. just hope SE doesnt do that to this game. this games doesnt need to be a kids game. but with the additions of late, they r trying to kill it faster then it should be

[Savanah]

Main thing holding this game back, of course, is the PS2 and its limitations. If someday SE can pull the plug on the PS2 version, they can really pump out some big updates to this game in the form of graphical/system updates and large scale expansions. It's like beating on a dead horse here, but at this point, the 10 year old PS2 console is holding this game back from becoming so much more. Ultima Online and EQ *still* are releasing expansion packs and have plenty of subscribers, and UO has been around for 14 years, EQ about 12-13. FFXI can last that long too if not longer, if SE plays their cards carefully and correctly.