5 Million Accounts - Japan Expo

[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.