Can someone clarify this " less than 1mill subs"

[Man-Sam]

I don't think square enix is willing to make their games f2p again. BEcause ff14 failed when it went f2p.

1.0 was never F2P, they extended their free trial because of how broken/unfinished/whateveryouwannacallit the game was at release. The free trial was extended until the development team felt they had updated the game enough to charge monthly. Then they started the Legacy campaign (pay for x months in 1.0 get legacy title and goodies in 2.0), and thus, the Legacy players were born!

[Felis]

I don't think square enix is willing to make their games f2p again. BEcause ff14 failed when it went f2p.

Official term was "extended free month"

[Riviere]

I'm not too worried. I started playing XI when it had around 150-200k subs and it had been out for a few years.

[ApolloGenX]

There is so much misunderstanding in this thread!

The one million active users comment was made by SQUARE-ENIX THIS WEEK. This was in their end of year report. (NOT the same as their annual financial report)

The comments about REGISTERED USERS that were referenced in the article WERE referencing the financial report from last year. This is NOT old news, it's brand new.

All you have to do is search and you can verify the comments of Yosuke Matsuda about the 1 million comment was made this week (first week 2015). I would provide a corroborating IGN link, but I don't know if they are allowed.

Yes, the population is lower than they originally let on, because before they were talking about registered users, and they didn't know how many were active. It looks like in 2014 they worked on improving their metrics, and now can give this number.

So, they have maybe a million active users NOW, across the portfolio -not last year. Now. (And no telling how many are RMT bots)

[Stumpedify]

There is so much misunderstanding in this thread!

The one million active users comment was made by SQUARE-ENIX THIS WEEK. This was in their end of year report. (NOT the same as their annual financial report)

While 1mil users sound about right compared to what we were lead to believe, unfortunately I think you've misunderstood here. The "End of Year" is MARCH 2014, it always is for businesses -- when they say end of year they mean end of the financial year, not december. I'm sorry, but the end of year report you mention, and the annual financial report are exactly the same thing. The IGN article is referring to the exact same report the Polygon article links, which was written in March -- it even links at the end of the article to the same pdf document as its source. Square were just really late in releasing a document full of outdated information.


But regardless of how old the information is, the point of the document is that SE is in a very good position right now thanks to FFXIV and is financially stable again -- just check out the rise in income during 2014 all thanks to FFXIV. There is nothing to indicate any need to go free to play and everything to indicate that the status quo of subscriptions is going to continue. The cash shop was just them copying Blizzard because Blizzard managed to get away with charging extra in their cash shop while maintaining a subscription for WoW, so SE probably thought they could get away with it as well -- and honestly, regardless of all the naysayers on the forums, SE WILL get away with it -- there are already people buying stuff off the shop, so it's already a success and subscriptions will continue regardless of it.

[kyuven]

That was good to be in such a place long before market saturation.

I think in its heyday, EverQuest only had about 100-200k subscribers, and it was the biggest show in town (in the west) until WoW came along.
Any p2p game that breaks 500k subscribers is doing well. Even if the game stagnates at that number, it's not necessarily a bad thing since you really can't hope to get more of the market share than that. In fact it's probably because of the anticipated stagnation that we got the cash shop added: While steady numbers are very good for keeping something afloat, the suits upstairs only see that the numbers aren't increasing. Thus, getting your existing customers to pony up more cash is the preferred method.
In the old days of EQ1 and bleeding into EQ2, they did this by releasing expansions once or twice a year. This is why EQ1 has 20+ expansions. However, they began to realize this model didn't work very well, as customers flocked to games that gave content updates for free.
So, cash shops were born.

[Gramul]

Yeah...I don't suggest reading polygon.
I wouldn't say it's quite yellow journalism, but it's awfully off white.

[Craiger]

We don't know how many subs there are, but the number doesn't really matter too much, as long as it's over a certain minimum... Which FFXIV 100% is.

It's more important to have a stable player base.

I usually notice when a MMO is losing players and slowly dying, but with FFXIV it feels like it's increasing every month actually... That might not be true, but I'm pretty sure it's stable at least.

Stable means that SE can put more money into it, because it's more safe... which in turn makes the game better, leading to more players.

Wow has sadly corrupted the view on "a big player base", because of their high amount of children and non-mmorpg players... (there are a ton of players in Wow, that have never played any other mmo, and doesn't know anything about the others)

[Amiantos]

Note the (recent) change in the title: it's based on a report from March 31, 2014.

So yeah...bad journalism at its finest.

It's Polygon what do you expect.

[ApolloGenX]

Look at

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/01/...and-the-future

Mitsuda made the 1 million comment this week.

It's not "just Polygon". It's SEs own words.

Mitsuda is talking about the CURRENT state of things... he did not qualify with "LAST YEAR" they were at a million and rising.

He was very clearly managing the expectations that the previous report had set. There's nothing wrong with that and it doesn't mean the game is failing. SE does have to be honest about the state of the game, though. They set revenue expectations with the last report, and when those don't materialize at the level they set, people need to know why. In this case, they didn't have a way to track active users effectively, and now they do.