5 Million Accounts - Japan Expo

As the topic title suggests, I would like to say Congratulations to Square and the FFXIV Dev team on making such a successful subscription based MMO. I love this game and am truly happy that so many others are enjoying it too!

*The above number does not include those registered on Free Trials.

Use this thread to congratulate Square, Yoshi P and the Dev Team!

[Source: IGN]

Congrats SE! It would be awesome to know what the current active subscriber base is though.

It would be nice to know but all that matters is if you enjoy this game =)_

Cause I certainly do =)

It was 4 million a month before HW iirc so that's a big feat.

Though I do wonder how many accounts from that additional million are down to Twintania mounts XD

The same info also mentions Yoshi hinting at FFX Blitzball and an FFXV crossover event being a possibility.

Congrats to Square and Yoshi, quite an accomplishment!

I'd like to say yay too, but how many of those are just bots and sellers?

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Originally Posted by AlphaFox

I'd like to say yay too, but how many of those are just bots and sellers?

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Not a huge amount, at least compared to freemium games.

A more interesting point is that gamers don't switch games, they abandon them. A while ago, we had a bunch of threads about "trying to get WoW players" by making the game have less story. Turns out that wouldn't get WoW players at all. People either like "that game" or they don't, and they don't switch MMO's like they would switch brands of soft drinks.

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World of Warcraft market
A good example here would be the success of World of Warcraft that, as analysts explained to us ten years ago, has “vastly expanded MMORPG market beyond all expectations”.

Except it didn’t. It created a new market, World of Warcraft market, gathered new audience from other games in different genres, attracted quite a few people that haven’t played before, but haven’t expanded MMORPG market much. There were no big successful MMORPGs after World of Warcraft not because WoW took all the audience, but because there were never too many people in “MMORPG but not World of Warcraft” market to begin with.

I think when you start thinking in terms of audiences for individual games instead of broad vague “MMORPG crowd”, “MOBA crowd” you’ll start to realize that sometimes a huge success of one big title doesn’t mean much for everyone else. It doesn’t expand existing market or destroy it, it creates a new one.

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So gamedevs need to quit cloning other games.

The fact that Square-Enix keeps FFXIV subscription means the game has a viable audience. All the Freemium games are can only hold their audience long enough until it's too frustrating to play without the cash shop and they abandon it the moment something they like better comes along.

Even if the 5 million isnt all active subscribers. The feat of going from 4 - 5million registered accounts within 6 months or so is pretty outstanding and it is well deserved. Yoshida, his team and Square Enix has truly turned the company around for the greater :D
Looking forward to Deus Ex, Hitman, Tomb Raider, Lost Cause 3, KH3, FF15 :D

With ffxi,ffxiv and dragon quest as of start of this year had less then 1m sub together lmao. By now ffxiv should have a little over 800k active users but that going to go down once WoW release there new pack.

how many of those accounts are
"hello new gift for you
30USD/10000k
at blahblah.com"

Would be nice to see some subscription numbers or server population numbers.
But registered accounts is something, I guess!

The que as a DD is not as long as before. This expansion is probably what this game need for the pop in FFXIV to rise!

5 million accounts does not = active subscription and basically means nothing.

The fact that they won't release actual active subscription numbers is very interesting.

Or maybe the whole reason for that is, active subscriptions vary wildly over time while registered accounts is a static number and thus are more 'concrete'? But then, there are too many people on this forum who for some reason want this game to fail, and hence tout this same rubbish over and over that 'active subscriptions are declining/extremely low,' and use outdated/inaccurate information from unreliable sources to back up their paranoid claims. If subs were so low, why are most servers congested and thus locked to new character creation (based on the amount of threads on this forum from players complaining about that)? Wouldn't SE have done a server merge a long time ago if sub numbers really were at ridiculously low number mentioned earlier in this thread?

Common sense is needed here. The game is healthy subscription wise. If it wasn't, SE would have actually admitted it long ago (like they did with 1.0). So enough of the doomsaying - people actually may actually start to believe these lies (that the game is dire straits subscription wise, which it most definitely is not).

I think the key word is "healthy." ARR's goal was never to be a WoW killer, it was to salvage the IP and Square Enix's reputation as a maker of quality RPGs. In that sense, it was successful beyond all expectation. Maintaining a healthy population on top of that success is a very definite win for SE, regardless of the total number of registered accounts. As long as the subs are making SE money, they are happy.

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Originally Posted by Zenaku

With ffxi,ffxiv and dragon quest as of start of this year had less then 1m sub together lmao. By now ffxiv should have a little over 800k active users but that going to go down once WoW release there new pack.

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Im not sure if you noticed, but WoW is dying, and guess what, legion isnt going to stop it.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

Or maybe the whole reason for that is, active subscriptions vary wildly over time while registered accounts is a static number and thus are more 'concrete'?

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False, registered accounts literally means nothing, they're just counting all accounts, even accounts of people who cancelled subs. Plus people with multiple accounts with no active subscription. Active subs gives you a general idea of how the game is doing and how much they're making because it tells you how many people are paying.

No one is saying the game isn't healthy nor is anyone on this thread doomsaying it's just obviously the active subscription isn't anywhere near 5 million and they way they keep throwing "accounts" around is kind of misleading.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

Actually, registered accounts IS in fact comparable to the box sales number of GW2. The client for this game isn't free. If you registered an account, it means you bought a copy of the game, whether you're actively playing or not. That's a very important point to remember.

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Paying 30 bucks and then never playing again in a subscription based game doesn't hold the same weight as an active subscription. If you're trying to figure out how much money they're making then yeah. But most people look at active subs to how many people are playing and steady income.

Actually, registered accounts IS in fact comparable to the box sales number of GW2. The client for this game isn't free. If you registered an account, it means you bought a copy of the game, whether you're actively playing or not. That's a very important point to remember.

Edit: I know it doesn't hold the same weight against a game that has an active subscription, e.g. WoW, but I specifically mentioned GW2 for that reason. The box sale price for GW2 was $39.99 at launch - so five million box copies of that is the same as for five million box copies of ARR. That is an apples to apples comparison.

-.- So much for wanting a positive thread...

Anyways, my two cents is that regardless of whether or not the subscription number is that high, as Catwho mentioned over 5 million people have bought the game and registered it on the Mog Station, so in that sense Square Enix is already onto a winner (ARR £19.99+, Heavensward £29.99+), granted not everyone of those will have the expansion but to see the game doing so well considering the disappointment of 1.0 is no mean feat and I felt that SE, Yoshi and the Dev Team deserved some congratulations for creating a (IMO!) very fun, exciting MMO given the current climate of MMO's going free to play.

Aslong as they keep doing what they are doing I expect the numbers to grow, and the good times to keep coming.

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Originally Posted by Terribad

5 million accounts does not = active subscription and basically means nothing.

The fact that they won't release actual active subscription numbers is very interesting.

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I feel like people see an active subscription number, use it to determine whether or not a game is good (usually comparing it to wow's active subscribers) and completely disregard it if it does not meet their expectations of how many subs an mmo should have. Without even giving the actual game a passing glance.

for example: 800,000 subscribers is a monumental feat for any company. But when you take that and compare it to WoW's current 5.4 million, it seems less impressive. The sad part is that wow is acutally down by a significant amount of subscribers, nearly half of what they started the current expansion with.

Alot of people bot. Extreme ease and spread of said form of cheating and the two biggest ff 14 bot websites according to visit tracker gets about 20k visits from unique internet ips a day. Most people who not have 3-4 accounts and from the 500 ish bots I counted on my server alone during the north than conga line that number of bots is just from casual cheaters and not counting hard core rmt a huge % of people cheat so yes allot of those accounts are bot s.

5 million accounts does not equate to 5 million subscribers. It seems far more likely that this is just how many accounts have been created.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

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A more interesting point is that gamers don't switch games, they abandon them.
-snip-

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Really? I've personally switched MMO's a couple of times, and I know others who have.

I'm not calling your data into question, or anything; I'm just saying it doesn't match my experience. I could easily be in the minority, though.

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Originally Posted by Vrath

Really? I've personally switched MMO's a couple of times, and I know others who have.

I'm not calling your data into question, or anything; I'm just saying it doesn't match my experience. I could easily be in the minority, though.

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It doesn't match my experience either. If I get bored of an MMO, I usually head to mmorpg.com and see what other MMOs are out there and test a bunch. I did this near the end of last year and landed on FFXIV as my choice (after checking Tera, Wildstar, WoW and leaving GW2).


As for the registered accounts vs subs, I think it's pretty obvious that subs is a more telling number of success. Plenty of people could have purchased the game and realized it wasn't for them and then cancelled. I did this exact thing with Wildstar (for example). It includes lifetime sales, though it's difficult to tell if that includes 1.0 sales?

Not many industries which have subscriptions show registered accounts numbers. Most MMO's will display subscribers or active playerbase. Cell phone companies will show current subscribers, not the total number of accounts created. TV Shows will show a viewer count per episode, not a tally of how many people have ever watched it etc.. It's just more valuable information to see how it's doing over time.

That said, we as consumers do not require this information. It is simply interesting information to know when looking over various MMO's, as having an active playerbase points to two things 1. usually quality content and 2. a populous world to play in.

5 mill is a pointless number honestly in terms of game health.

5mill sounds big but what is the retention of that 5mill? 10-20-30%? What is he average length of a single sub? 1month, 3months, 6months, 12months?

Honestly the only number that really matters in a p2p game is what is the active subscription number.

If FFXIV had 5mill accounts created and has 700k subs actively playing for argument. That is a 14% retention over a fairly short period of time for a mmo. I mean even a million subs that is a 20% retention rate.

I do not see the subs going up at least not in a large way considering no new servers were created in the last 1million people that bought the game since the last big account number they announced. I see that as a negative more then a positive honestly they are not holding the subs they are getting.

It is great that many people are buying the game. But Yoshida and the devs need to focus on holding subscribers as well I feel. We should be over 1million atm with that many people buying the game in the last 2 yrs.

Congrats on those 4 million spambot accounts and 1 million actual players!

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Originally Posted by Kumop

Anyways, my two cents is that regardless of whether or not the subscription number is that high, as Catwho mentioned over 5 million people have bought the game and registered it on the Mog Station, so in that sense Square Enix is already onto a winner (ARR £19.99+, Heavensward £29.99+)

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It's not quite that straightforward ever since the game launched in china on august 2014.

Most gaming in china occurs in internet cafe and they use their chinese id and pay an hourly rate. The game also launched in south korea in a similar scenario but the 5 million registered accounts do not count korea accounts.

Here's a timeline (registered accounts, not subscriber number)

2014-04 2 million accounts
2014-08 china launch with 34 servers
2015-02 4 million accounts
2015-07 south korea launch *
2015-08 5 million accounts

They don't itemize their registered account number according to region so we can only guess. But i would speculate that the bigger chunk of the increase from 2 mil to 5 mil accounts is from china.




Sidenote: According to this updated article, they said SE told them this:

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Updated: These MMO figures actually come from an original financial report that was filed on March 31st, 2014. Square Enix tells MCV that the actual number of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn paying subscribers sits at 500,000, with over 2.5m registered users. These numbers do not include the game's performance in China, which charges Chinese gamers on a per-minute pay model. A Realm Reborn will launch in Korea in 2015.

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The completed quarter a week before that quote (12/31/14) about the 500k subs shows digital entertainment revenue at 31,699 million yen.

In comparison, the latest quarter report that completed on 6/30/15 shows digital entertainment revenue at 30,297 million yen.

No mention of paid sub numbers on the latest report but interesting it's about the same **. I may be tired and missed something so i'll have to check after some sleep.




* South Korea accounts not counted yet.
** Haven't accounted for exchange rates but since they didn't separate revenue to the various regions, it's almost pointless.

*** Square Enix Investor Relations

Congrats to the team yes :o)

We as well, have given some really great suggestions to help improve FFXIV and in turn sustain player interest over time, I do hope they implement as much as possible to help retain subscribers.

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Originally Posted by SQBoard

Here's a timeline (registered accounts, not subscriber number)

2015-07 south korea launch
2015-08 5 million accounts

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Slightly incorrect there: FFXIV launched in Korea this month, and Yoshida had already announced the 5 million mark had been crossed back at the beginning of July. New Korean subscribers won't be included until the next count/announcement.

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Sidenote: According to this updated article, they said SE told them this:

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That 500k figure was fabricated; SE told the author of the article no such thing. I know this because they quite literally told the technology site I write for as much in as many words when we reached out for confirmation of the same, citing Erik's claimed figures. SE quite deliberately (and notoriously) keep this particular number close to their collective chests, and according to their representative this occasion was no different.

From what I can tell, after initially posting incorrect information in his article (having made the same lazy mistake as many others of ignorantly using the March 2014 report to describe 2015 figures) and having to address that, Erik decided in an attempt to save face that he'd just claim SE had confirmed the figures he guessed at from the March report's confirmation of one million combined subscribers for FFXI, FFXIV and DQX, assuming the number of active subscriptions was a figure openly available to anybody who asked.

I don't think Erik realised that SE doesn't provide those figures to the general public. There's a very good reason why only that one solitary article on the entire internet over the past two years claims to have been told the exact number of active FFXIV subscribers, and that's because that number was simply made up to whitewash the author's embarrassing lack of fact-checking the first time around.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

A more interesting point is that gamers don't switch games, they abandon them. A while ago, we had a bunch of threads about "trying to get WoW players" by making the game have less story. Turns out that wouldn't get WoW players at all. People either like "that game" or they don't, and they don't switch MMO's like they would switch brands of soft drinks.

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Almost everyone I've met in every MMO I've played has played at least 1 other and quite often several MMOs. Most common among them WoW, of course. And I constantly meet people in other games who started with WoW, City of Heroes, Everquest, or Guild Wars 1. In about that order of frequency (The City of Heroes players show up so much despite it being a smaller game because the game was killed by its parent company right while it was going strong).

I really disagree on this idea that gamers don't switch games. I've very rarely met anyone who had only played one MMO. Save for WoW during its heyday. But now in WoW, or at least last time I was in there about 4-5 months ago - everyone I encountered had been in some other MMO for a while or concurrently. What I find now is a lot of people cycle through MMOs when patch cycles are long or not going the way they wanted them to.

That said I do agree that very few accounts are bots / sellers. Almost none actually. Hackers on the other hand tend to steal people's accounts, but even this is a very small number. It doesn't take that many to create a very visible problem. One person online at a peak moment going through the list of players and macro spamming everybody and suddenly people will think there is an army of spammers...

More likely is that the hackers had a few hundred accounts, but only use 1 to 2 at a time... and when those get blocked, they can just slip into somebody else's account and go at it again. Its another reason to ALWAYS have a two-step authenticator (what this game calls the One-time password thingy), and a unique password / email combo.

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Originally Posted by Ducky

Slightly incorrect there: FFXIV launched in Korea this month, and Yoshida had already announced the 5 million mark had been crossed back at the beginning of July. New Korean subscribers won't be included until the next count/announcement.

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Yeah, that's my typo since the link i provided says august (should've put 8 not 7 as the month) but i already said in that post that korea accounts are not included. I just included it in case anyone says that korea accounts are counted.

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Originally Posted by Ducky

That 500k figure was fabricated; SE told the author of the article no such thing. I know this because they quite literally told the technology site I write for as much in as many words when we reached out for confirmation of the same, citing Erik's claimed figures. SE quite deliberately (and notoriously) keep this particular number close to their collective chests, and according to their representative this occasion was no different.

From what I can tell, after initially posting incorrect information in his article (having made the same lazy mistake as many others of ignorantly using the March 2014 report to describe 2015 figures) and having to address that, Erik decided in an attempt to save face that he'd just claim SE had confirmed the figures he guessed at from the March report's confirmation of one million combined subscribers for FFXI, FFXIV and DQX, assuming the number of active subscriptions was a figure openly available to anybody who asked.

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Don't suppose you have a published link to corroborate this since that's a serious allegation.

Only because it's strange since the update portion of that article references 2.5 mil registered accounts that seemingly match SE's slide at the end of the eternal bond trailer and yet he didn't correct the 500k number since that lie or mistake as you mentioned would be costly for him.

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Originally Posted by Zenaku

With ffxi,ffxiv and dragon quest as of start of this year had less then 1m sub together lmao. By now ffxiv should have a little over 800k active users but that going to go down once WoW release there new pack.

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I hope you are one of the ones that will be leaving..