Quote Originally Posted by Phe View Post
and you can't tell me more than 300 people are involved with ARR on a regular basis.
Trust me, there's more than 300 people involved. 300 people may just be the in-house staff. There's still the likes of temp agencies for CS, accountants, and legal, all of which are probably shared with Square-Enix's other divisions. Just handling the international support for the game would require a minimum of 3 different offices (JP, NA, EU) and about 100 personnel for each one. Granted most of these personnel take in far less money than, say, the development team, but there still needs to be a lot of them to meet the needs of the playerbase. There needs to be phone support, email support, website support, and in-game support for more than 5 dozen servers. And they need representation from English, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, and likely many other languages.
Yeah, CS is a mess.
Then there's taxes, and the accounting departments, and the legal team.
Basically the FFXIV's calculated "5m pure profit" gets shredded to pieces when you start chopping it up for taxes and paying for additional offices/services. And that's before getting into other contracts.
Let me put it this way: If it were as profitable as you're implying, why are there so few P2P MMOs left?
"doing the math" is no substitute for simple logic in this case.