only 500k subscribers?

[Phe]

wait, that means if we lose another 500k subs, that's 0.

0, folks, ZERO

that means goodnight and thanks for all the fish.

[RichardButte]

I'm perfectly happy with 500k subs. The game clearly won't be DYING anytime soon, so what's to worry about?

The age of "WoW numbers" is over. ARR has been out for about a year now, right? Most new MMOs would be THRILLED to have 500k subs, especially in an era when F2P is becoming the absolute norm because so many games cannot remain P2P and survive.

FFXIV is a winning product, bringing in $6.5 million every month because we know all of those 500k are paying customers instead of 3/4ths of them being F2P and buying nothing.

[Noshpan]

I laugh at people who think that the only way that an MMO is successful is if it has WoW's numbers at its peak (which was over 6,000,000 subscribers during Wrath of the Lich King). 500,000 is really about par of the course. It's the numbers that EverQuest had during its peak. Warhammer Online peaked at 500k subscribers early on. Dark Age of Camelot sits (or has) at around 100-200k. It's just that WoW is an outlier when it comes to subscriber numbers, that I don't think even Blizzard could mimic with a second MMO.

[LunaHoshino]

Most companies have calendar tax years 12/31, others have fiscal year tax years of their picking. SE picked 3/31.

Just to point out, SE did not "pick" 3/31. That's when the Japanese fiscal year ends-- theirs runs from April-March, unlike ours.

[Delorean]

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/squar...ribers/0143457

Update is 20 days old but says source is SE themselves

These numbers do not include the game's performance in China, which charges Chinese gamers on a per-minute pay model. A Realm Reborn will launch in Korea in 2015.

10charszzzzzz

[elreed]

worse than I thought if it's true

Maybe true, but Excalibur server is very populated, a friend cant join it at the moment, now that im doing atma weapon books ive seen lots of people in all the zones, so the game looks far from empty.

[Riviere]

It's sad to see that the servers are empty and content has stopped getting released. I just can't take it that I don't play the most popular MMO, what are all the cool kids doing now?

I don't know but we better find out!

P.S. Didn't we have a thread like this a month ago? Is this a monthly thing now?

[radioactive_lego]

To my knowlege, FFXIV is the only MMO available on current-gen consoles. While probably considered a "niche" game/genre, I think PS4 sales have impacted the playerbase. The PS4 had sales of about 4M by the end of March 2014. Recent numbers for the system put it at 18M and growing. If 1 out of every X PS4 owners bought (free trialed?) FFXIV since March of last year that's an increase, at least on tiral, of 14M/X players.*

X = 500 = 28K
X = 200 = 70K (0.5% adoption)
X = 100 = 140K (1% adoption)

*Anyone can speculate the adoption rate for FFXIV among the PS4 community, or how many of those were PS3 crossovers, but I think the growth of the PS4 can easily be counted as growth for the FFXIV playerbase.

[Rekujin]

You'll find that most people actually pay with game cards because they are generally cheaper... and im sure game cards don't count as a "sub"

[Krr]

500k is like...solid second or third-place contender by western MMO market standards. We're also in a pre-expansion slump, which tends to deflate numbers pretty considerably, and odd-number catch up patches are not really the most popular.