only 500k subscribers?

[kyuven]

The first EverQuest game lived and breathed for many, many years on about as many subscribers as FFXIV has now, and they didn't even have to compete with market saturation.
500k doesn't sound like a lot, but keep in mind how oversaturated the market is, and that games with more tend to be F2P models where they cant legitimately count anyone who has ever made an account and logged in ONCE "active."

Also TESO and SWTOR may have had that many subscribers at one time, but any analyst worth their salt would take a look at how many they LOST from one month to the next to project how the game would do. SWTOR, for example, is a great game to play for a single month til you beat it. Not so great to keep coming back to except for content updates.
FFXIV, meanwhile, may have fewer subscribers than SWTOR did at that time, but the numbers are likely very stable in comparison and the game itself actually works and works well (TESO and SWTOR both had more bugs than a new york apartment in summer) compounded with the fact that the development team's biggest gripe against them has been...housing prices and a cash shop.
And that's all I'll say about those two because they're not the topic here :P