FFXIV and the Income

You know, since the LL i was thinking about a few Things, we are always talking here that Square Enix is using the Income for other Projects and they lack the Resources/Money but lets just take us a look at a Core Level, i say it again a CORE LEVEL.

Of course a lot of things are purely speculation because we have no 100% accurate Numbers so take it with a bit grain of salt here. (I use € here because i really dont wanna bother now how the active exchange value for Money is, so consider that too)

Judging from a few Public Archivment Sites and other means, we are currently probably sitting at around 1mio active Players maybe 2 Mio, the last Savage Tier was cleared by around 10% of the Playerbase which leads to around 100k Players which leads me to to conclusion with the 1mio, but sadly thats like i said no accurate number because this involves only public archivments, so hidden archivment Pages on the Lodestone etc can have a impact on it, but most people should now we dont have the 4mio daily playerbase anymore


Now a Sub in Germany costs 11€ the small one and the big one 13€ since not everyone uses the big one and not everyone goes with the small one i just divided in a 50:50 ratio

500.000 x 13 = 6.500.000€
500.000 x 11 =+5.500.000€
=12.000.000€ Monthly

This of course doesnt involve things like Merchandise, Mogstore Items and Additional Services like Retainer or first Game buys etc thats why i said we only look at a Corebase

So now we sitting on 12mio, now there are Employee Costs, Server Costs, Taxes (i think atleast JP has taxes, im not so into JP Stuff so if there is someone with more knowledge) Production Costs, the Musicteam, i can guess Soken is not really cheap

For me atleast it doesnt look like that there is much left to spend on other Projects, if you now even involve theoreticlly Mogstation and Merchandise you can probably add another 10Mio or more but like i said i think a lot of Money goes even in the Production Costs of the next Expansion then



Dont get me wrong the Thread is not about defending Square, i just was curious about it, i just thought i share my thoughprocesses

I did some maths during the last tier and it was actually cleared by 29.8% of active players who cleared the normal raids. By the end of the tier, this figure was quite a bit higher. 55% in JP, 35% on Aether and 20% on Crystal. Most places had at least 20% except a few really dead worlds/data centers and the lowest was 11% on Kraken. FFXIVCollect is unreliable because most of the players in its tally are inactive players from potentially years ago who may not even have subscribed since Shadowbringers. This is just people who cleared M4S; it doesn't include people who only cleared 1-3 which will be even higher. So the engagement with Savage is way higher than people believe.

Regarding sub numbers, we know Lucky Bancho shows around 900,000 but we also know from various historical data points that the alt character rate can be around 11-20%. It seems to fluctuate based on the time in the patch cycles. It's hard to say when but at some point people bring out all their raid alts to help people clear Savage, or people make new characters for fun, maybe during content lulls.

If you look at SE's financial reports, they make a lot more than the estimated subscribers, suggesting a significant amount of retainer subs or people who subscribe but don't actually play (sort of like subscribing to Netflix and never watching anything). Another possibility is SE just isn't very good at creating accurate financial reports - the reports are not at all consistent with subscriptions, sometimes showing dives well below estimated subscriber numbers, which suggests they don't necessarily put all financial data into their quarterly reports and delay it until the next one.

But on a core level, let's look at it:
900,000 x $14.99 x 12 months = $161,892,000 per year

It's estimated there are 300 people working on the game. So:
$161,892,000 - ($80,748 x 300) = $137,667,600 remaining per year

But let's assume this covers all their 4,770 employees and that nothing else funds them such as base game sales, expansion sales, merch, mogstation, FF7R, FF16, re-releases, DQ or other releases:

$161,892,000 - ($80,748 x 4,770) = $-223,275,960 remaining per year

So subscription fees alone can't, in theory, fund all 4,770 Square Enix employee wages, but it can fund CBU3 specifically with plenty to spare. Of course, there are server costs and taxes to consider. However, base game sales, expansion sales, merch, mogstation, FF7R, FF16, re-releases, DQ or other releases also help.

I did make an assumption about their wages. Some of their wages will be really low (graduates), while others will be really high due to experience or highly skilled roles, so I just assumed a pretty high wage across the board - some may be more and some less.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

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Of course, i just did look in the financial report too, but like i said production costs etc have a huge impact too, and i kinda think that most of the income from expansion sells flows back in the production costs of the next expansion


And yea the Subs alone could fund the CBU3 too, but sadly thats not how companys work, sadly the income each product generates is divided in more then one area even if it has nothing to do with the game from where the income comes

But its funny and really informative to just take a look at all that stuff