Famitsu interview with Yoshi

[Kosmos992k]

FF XIV don't have 4 Million active players. It is said to be 4 Million Accounts. Active player are estimated to be around 400k-500k. Means an earning of ~5.5 Million Euro. Now subtract taxes, Salary, Server leasing, services, Development of Content and Expansions, Services, Translation and ofc. profit.

They say over 5 million accounts (actually I think it says 5.5 million on one of the more recent things I've seen), not 4 million. I'm not sure about the active player estimates, 400-500k might be an underestimate of the active player-base if it's not SE's own data on concurrent users. A lot of the metrics used by third parties to gauge player activity are based on progression content, which depending on the type of player may not be a good indicator of activity. They also scrape the Lodestone for the data, and data scraping from websites is not always the most reliable way to obtain information.

For example, I doubt my character counts as active on many of those 'counts' and yet I'm on almost every day for a couple of hours at least. But because I don't run progression content, I'm unlikely to trigger many (if any) of the conditions third party 'surveys' use to determine activity. I know I am not alone in this.

Also, has anyone ever tried to count up all the accounts permanently disabled because of RMT or other illegal activity? If you go through those weekly reports I'd guess that we are *well* past half a million accounts that have been listed as being permanently banned from the game. In an ideal world, I'd hope that their number of accounts that they tout would *not* include those RMT accounts that they have identified and taken action against. This is not an ideal world however, so I don't know if they exclude known RMT accounts from the number of user accounts that they claim.

Hmmm... am I the only one who thought of "Oh hey, personal housing?"

No, but it depends on how many instances within instances their architecture is designed to handle.