5 Million Accounts - Japan Expo

[Averax]

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.

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.

[Vlady]

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.

[Deathscythe343]

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.

[Vrath]

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

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.

[Kaurie]

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.

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.

[Xatsh]

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.

[Sicno]

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

[SQBoard]

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+)

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:

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.

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

[MistyMew]

Congrats to the team yes )

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.

[Ducky]

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

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

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.

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

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.