Quote Originally Posted by Preypacer View Post
Indeed they are.

Check out this blurb...

- Original Source

FFXI broke even a little over 1.5 years after its launch. It will take XIV longer than that, obviously, as it's essentially been developed twice now and has a higher "break even" point. But if the game is solid and fun and keeps people playing, they can definitely break even and become profitable with XIV as well, without having to go the F2P route.

And let's look at the numbers stated... 1.5 years at only 200,000 players for XI to break even. It went on to maintain over 500,000 for several years. In other words, FFXI has been a major cash-cow for SE for almost a decade. Even now, all these years later, they're still hovering at around 300,000 players, so they're still beyond what their initial "break-even" point was.

So, does anyone really think that hitting even 300-500k consistent paying players would be bad? I hardly think so.
You see most companies want to maximize their profits. EA was not happy with SWTOR numbers being at 1m subscribers was not good enough for them, and they went F2P. They wanted WoW like numbers constant 10m+ subs and they were not going to get that. Most analysts agree that something like WoW will never happen again, pretty much impossible to achieve that kind of success they did it was a one time fluke.

SE on the other hand is different they are content with having like around 200k subscribers which is about what FFXI currently has, they already did server mergers 2 times now, add very little content to the game but keep the game going with subs because it still makes them about 2.5m a month with very little spent on development and updates. Now it would not make sense for them to go F2P on this game it is very old game it wouldn't attract the new people who would want to play a F2P game so they would be throwing away that 2.5m a month they make now if they ever went F2P so it doesn't really make sense. However on a new game like FF14 a F2P model can work very well.

There are some people out there given the opportunity will drop a couple thousand dollers a month on cash shop items. That one guy is actually equal to like 200 subscribers. There is a reason that F2P mmo model has become so popular and it isn't because companies out of the goodness in their heart want to give players a game to play for free