Why I started playing FF14

[Enkidoh]

http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/

I got my info from the investor relations reports, and balance sheets. They aren't the most reliable, by far, nor are they for only ffxiv, however looking at the past few quarters has showed a decline in profits related to subscription rights (earnings, page 9, 3/4 down the page). I'm not saying thart the game is only losing players over minor QoL things. there are a lot of reasons why the game loses players. a lack of continued interest things to do, a lack of community interactions outside of instances, and a lack of casual friendly endgame products, for example. It happens to a lot of newer MMO's, and im not faulting FF for that, but it happens..

Ah, thanks for that. Although I think they're using the term 'subscription games' in a general sense and are not referring to FFXIV (or FFXI too for that matter) specifically - after all, they have a whole heap of substandard mobile games which have cash shops running at the moment, to say nothing of the recent re-releases of the PC versions of FFVII and VIII which have paid functions as well (those so-called 'character boosters). It was already well known the mobile games were causing SE a headache financially as they were being (rightly) hammered in the press, so I'm liable to believe this is what they're referring to in the financial report.

But... it does make one wonder why until patch 2.4 they had an increasing player count on the Lodestone then removed it suddenly with just a 'BUY NOW' label in big letters...

*Shakes head* No.. must not... give into paranoia...

[tocsin]

snip...

Very true. just also adding to the paranoia is the number itself:

the revenue lists 372 million yen generated by subscriptions total for ffxi and ffxiv, which is 3.1 million dollars at current exchange rate / average 12 dollars per sub = 260k subs.

if an MMO is down to that many subs, I can definitely see it needing a cash shop to bolster its numbers, especially when trying to fund a multi-million dollar expansion.

These numbers are just for giggles, though. I wish they would just come out and make their numbers real.