Can someone clarify this " less than 1mill subs"

[Riviere]

I'm not too worried. I started playing XI when it had around 150-200k subs and it had been out for a few years.

[ApolloGenX]

There is so much misunderstanding in this thread!

The one million active users comment was made by SQUARE-ENIX THIS WEEK. This was in their end of year report. (NOT the same as their annual financial report)

The comments about REGISTERED USERS that were referenced in the article WERE referencing the financial report from last year. This is NOT old news, it's brand new.

All you have to do is search and you can verify the comments of Yosuke Matsuda about the 1 million comment was made this week (first week 2015). I would provide a corroborating IGN link, but I don't know if they are allowed.

Yes, the population is lower than they originally let on, because before they were talking about registered users, and they didn't know how many were active. It looks like in 2014 they worked on improving their metrics, and now can give this number.

So, they have maybe a million active users NOW, across the portfolio -not last year. Now. (And no telling how many are RMT bots)

[Stumpedify]

There is so much misunderstanding in this thread!

The one million active users comment was made by SQUARE-ENIX THIS WEEK. This was in their end of year report. (NOT the same as their annual financial report)

While 1mil users sound about right compared to what we were lead to believe, unfortunately I think you've misunderstood here. The "End of Year" is MARCH 2014, it always is for businesses -- when they say end of year they mean end of the financial year, not december. I'm sorry, but the end of year report you mention, and the annual financial report are exactly the same thing. The IGN article is referring to the exact same report the Polygon article links, which was written in March -- it even links at the end of the article to the same pdf document as its source. Square were just really late in releasing a document full of outdated information.


But regardless of how old the information is, the point of the document is that SE is in a very good position right now thanks to FFXIV and is financially stable again -- just check out the rise in income during 2014 all thanks to FFXIV. There is nothing to indicate any need to go free to play and everything to indicate that the status quo of subscriptions is going to continue. The cash shop was just them copying Blizzard because Blizzard managed to get away with charging extra in their cash shop while maintaining a subscription for WoW, so SE probably thought they could get away with it as well -- and honestly, regardless of all the naysayers on the forums, SE WILL get away with it -- there are already people buying stuff off the shop, so it's already a success and subscriptions will continue regardless of it.

[Gramul]

Yeah...I don't suggest reading polygon.
I wouldn't say it's quite yellow journalism, but it's awfully off white.

[Craiger]

We don't know how many subs there are, but the number doesn't really matter too much, as long as it's over a certain minimum... Which FFXIV 100% is.

It's more important to have a stable player base.

I usually notice when a MMO is losing players and slowly dying, but with FFXIV it feels like it's increasing every month actually... That might not be true, but I'm pretty sure it's stable at least.

Stable means that SE can put more money into it, because it's more safe... which in turn makes the game better, leading to more players.

Wow has sadly corrupted the view on "a big player base", because of their high amount of children and non-mmorpg players... (there are a ton of players in Wow, that have never played any other mmo, and doesn't know anything about the others)

[Fornix]

Less than 1 million is being said as if its a bad thing .

[Xoriam]

They posted this crap over at mmorpg.com too -_-

http://www.mmorpg.com/newsroom.cfm/r....html#comments

[ApolloGenX]

I think it's interesting that fans will try to dispute a statement from SE itself this week, because they don't "feel" like it is true.

Except, those same people defend SE on everything else.

It's okay- Having a million players across games isn't bad. 500k used to be the standard for major success. The only game that is an outlier is WoW... and this game will never be that. So I think people should be happy that this game would traditionally have been a big success at 500-750k.

[Amiantos]

I think it's interesting that fans will try to dispute a statement from SE itself this week, because they don't "feel" like it is true.

Except, those same people defend SE on everything else.

It's okay- Having a million players across games isn't bad. 500k used to be the standard for major success. The only game that is an outlier is WoW... and this game will never be that. So I think people should be happy that this game would traditionally have been a big success at 500-750k.

Sorry I just have a hard time believing anything from sources that all publish stuff roughly within a short period of each other after some prior shit said sites have done in the same method.

[Roris]

I think it's interesting that fans will try to dispute a statement from SE itself this week, because they don't "feel" like it is true.

Pretty much. Those numbers from early 2014 won't suddenly explode into 3 million subs for ARR today, if anything they probably stayed the same, especially considering it pretty much flopped hard in China. There was the Korea version's launch recently but I can't really see that doing any better.

DQX's most recent figures were around 350k subs, I can't really imagine FFXI having more than 100k subs right now or 150k at best, so from that just subtract from a million and those numbers are close to what people on reddit have already guesstimated to be ARR's recent subscriber figures.

Sure 600k subs isn't bad I guess, but who knows what SE makes of it, they do at least consider them solid. Although those same figures sure weren't solid for TOR or any other WoW clone MMO in the past decade. It is worth mentioning Yoshida mentioned they don't have to answer as much to investors so they can get away with lower figures, which is a bit hard to believe. There is the precedent of FFXI still being sub based despite its low sub figures, but there's also the precedent of stuff like All the Bravest and all their recent F2P offerings so it all comes down to what upper management does about those figures, which they probably already did do something since they've been pushing the cash shop really hard. Then finally on that very same report it mentions how SE is considering F2P models for their major HD titles, which could or could not mean ARR.

At least it'll put a stop to the people screaming about how the game has 3 million subscribers, when those numbers were always just registered accounts.