So, even Wildstar is going f2p...

[Chek]

Like others have said above, successful MMOs don't go F2P like that. Fortunately I think the Japanese understand how to reasonably gauge their success since even when FFXI wasn't pulling 12 million subs they kept it's model true. They know you don't need ALL OF THE SUBS to make profit.

[Gardes]

Wildstar is the living proof: aiming to "hardcore players" and leaving no room / not taking care as u should of casuals is a bad... bad deal.

I'm surprised more people haven't come in waving this flag. Personally I don't believe it (that the game was made and marketed for hardcore). Even if the intention was there, as someone who watched the ads, articles, video previews, dev talks, streams, etc all I got from those is "Wow, this game is made by douchebags aimed at douchebags". Let's not forget that alot of people tend think that they're better than they actually are.

[SirDiscoFrog]

Again: link? I follow this community and the reddit community, and I'd think official subscriber numbers being released would be big news.

It seemed to be a big deal. We had a free login event to celebrate and it was featured on a few sites.

The Free Login Campaign
Here~ And Here~ to link a couple of em.

Them being all active all at once is probably not the case but I do think that the main thing is that accumulated together there have been at least 4 mil subs.

Back onto the topic of Wildstar, I do remember the hype of it along with ESO and Destiny but out of the 3 only Destiny remained spoken about from the people I know. They didnt seem to hold many's attention for long. In terms of Wildstar's marketing nothing really reached out to me as being marketed specifically for hardcore as much as the art style just screaming WoW-toon-esce to me (another thing that kinda steered me clear from it), but it could be more so of how things were done within the game that more so appealed to hardcore players. It never piqued my interest and from how quickly the hype died I can't see the surprise in Wildstar becoming F2P. That being said, Yoshi-P's response to all the F2P business and the success of this game so far(even the fact that FFXI is still going) has me confident FFXIV will stay P2P.

[Dualblade]

snip

If I'm right ESO is about to have an expansion, at the very least its getting ads...no idea if that means its DOING well, but still.

[Cynfael]

Have to chuckle at people taking pot-shots at the cash shop in this game.

It's soooo very not in-your-face that it's kind of funny. The cash shop in this game kind of boils down to this: "Players, if it pleases you, enjoy these extremely optional items of zero gameplay value for a pittance of your hard-earned RL currency. Thank you so much for even thinking about shopping outside of your subscription. Love, Yoshida and Team." As others have pointed out, they barely update the damned thing; it's kind of obvious that the cash shop is far down the priority list and/or has a very small team supporting it.

Anyway, as long as the developers continue to provide a game service that many people enjoy and are willing to pay for, it's doubtful that the business model will undergo drastic changes.

[SirDiscoFrog]

snip

True, true. Their new model also looks more B2P than just straight up F2P, which to me seems like they at least are potentially doing decently.

[Synestra]

If you then compare the cost of full access to the game for a month under the F2P model it's typically many many times higher than a regular monthly subscription which would grant the same full access under the P2P model.

This! Its funny when peoples usually praise F2P model for being free, its far from truth because if you want to enjoy all of the content and get all best items it will cost WAY more that sub fee. Prime example are games that uses + upgrades on gear, to get max upgrade level you need to dump tons and tons of irl money because you usually cant get those materials from ingame, and if you do its extremely lowdrop and still have failure chance when enchanting(im looking at you TERA). Allods online had stat runes and to get one maxed total end cost was approx 2000$ each and you needed 6 of them, so with these kind of costs you can kiss goodbye for minmaxing and in worstcase for whole end-game scene.

[Zumi]

Cash shop does well enough in FFXIV I see tons of those paid wedding mounts, odin mount, and minions.

[Thayos]

Cash shop does well enough in FFXIV I see tons of those paid wedding mounts, odin mount, and minions.

FFXIV's cash shop is awesome! If I didn't already know about it, I wouldn't even know it existed just by playing the game.

[Akuryu]

It seemed to be a big deal. We had a free login event to celebrate and it was featured on a few sites.

You didn't read my original posts. Registered accounts are not the same as subscribers. People can register and never even buy the game. Players who quit 1 month after launch are still counted in that total. All signs point to the game having less than 1 million subs. As I said, it's not even a bad thing... not sure why you guys are so defensive about it.

I link you to this article: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/25/f...the-franchise/

FFXI has been the most profitable game in SE's entire catalogue for some time. FFXIV won't be far behind if its subscription numbers remain stable or continue to rise as they currently appear to be doing.

I think you underestimate just how much money subscriptions and expansion purchases can bring in.

FFXI is the most profitable because it has ran well over a decade with monthly fees, whereas the other FF games saw their time come and go. I never said SE doesn't make any money off their MMOs. I was responding to a poster who basically said that without the 2 MMOs, Final Fantasy would have died 10 years ago. That's just silly. Every single player FF game still sells 5 million+ copies. And I went on to point out that mobile games are making SE more money than the MMOs... so if anything is "keeping them afloat" it's that division.