ARR has 600k subscribers

[Starlord]

I'm curious how they sold 1.5 million copies, and only have 600k subscribers though.

In any MMO, Launch ( Honeymoon phase), has a HUGE spike uprise in players until about the end of the free trial. After that, they don't wanna pay for the subscription for various reasons:

1) They hate the thought of paying for a sub for a game that they own
2) Some people just won't like the game
3) Rushers ( Get to max have nothing to do and quit for a time or perhaps forever)
4) Community/Experience with the Community (either in a good or bad way will determine if they will stay or not, especially if they are new to MMOs)

And so on, for the subs to be at 600k when they were only foreseeing only like 250k is a very big triumph for a game that was on the verge of defeat.

They have 350k more subs then they were originally planning for. In a manner of speaking, they have a lot of sub room to work with!

[Reslin]

There are also ppl in those numbers like me, I bought both ps3 and PC but only count as one account!

That's true in any mmorpg as well though. There's people I know on eve who have 6.

[Tupsi]

Guys, the 1.5mil number is counting from the 1.0 days, so its 600k Subs from the 1.5 mil units sold since Sept 30, 2010. Perspective is important.

iirc XIV 1.0 sold about 625k copies then as well. Hopefully they speed up content updates after 2.1 - I mean, FFXI releases updates almost every month even in small/medium, so hopefully after this "bump" it goes a lot faster since it was supposed to be the larger content additions every x months but smaller updates in between.

[Reslin]

iirc XIV 1.0 sold about 625k copies then as well. Hopefully they speed up content updates after 2.1 - I mean, FFXI releases updates almost every month even in small/medium, so hopefully after this "bump" it goes a lot faster since it was supposed to be the larger content additions every x months but smaller updates in between.

Spoiler alert. Yagrush was wrong. They don't count 1.0 units.

[Bearssi]

SW:ToR had similar bought/subscription ratio after few months. These numbers really does not represent the profitability, would have to see the whole picture.

[Andrien]

Got to consider the possibility of people waiting for the PS4 version.

I know a few people who have played out their free trial version, and now they're waiting to upgrade on PS4.

[Erana]

Not sure if this has been posted ye, but oh well.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/squar...opment/0123831
Just an interesting read.

[Mezolitik]

Not sure if this has been posted ye, but oh well.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/squar...opment/0123831
Just an interesting read.

It adds that it “hopes to transform the fixed-price model of online games into variable earnings models".

Micro-transactions?

[Astarica]

MMORPGs are quite profitable unless grossly mismanaged. I remember WoW announced their total operating expenses is around $50 million an year. Assuming a subscriber pays $15X12 months, that expense can be covered by 277K subscribers, and that doesn't even include any box sales or other services. Now, the total staff that is responsible for content development probably requires significantly more money than that, but it's not the customer's problem if a company overpaid its staff. People need to stop buying the lies about how it actually costs money to run a MMORPG. The amount needed to keep the actual infrastructure running is basically irrelevent compared to the money a MMORPG pulls in.

[Abriael]

So 900 thousand people just stopped playing in three months time? It seems like a weird discrepancy to me. In any case, no need to dwell on it as 600k subscribers is excellent.

Not necessarily. Remember that retail numbers are shipments, not sales.

While this doesn't concern square enix (for them a shipped game is a sold game, no matter of it finds a home or not), not all of those are necessarily players.

The article is outdated. This same information was posted by other sites on september 30th. We had another article in late october about how final fantasy gained another 500,000 players. Recent articles have all been sporting "1.5 million accounts." This article is using September information when it's currently november. Note, 600,000 is still good even if I'm wrong.

Actually the document states quite clearly that the subscription numbers are updated to the "most recent date".


To the doom and gloom/free to play creeps. The game now has more paying players than Final Fantasy XI ever did. Final Fantasy XI is the most profitable FF game of all time, and it never went free to play. Do your math.