When people want to compare the success of XIV to XI, honestly its not a fair comparison since one game has something that the other did not have, which is a cash shop. In terms of subs, they honestly have the same amount but that varies on the time. At its peak, XI did not have much other competition other than wow and a handful of titles. Since this game has many of WoW's elements and Blizzard has been doing a very lack luster job at producing any content with about a year long content drought on their last two expansions, of course this game will get decent numbers over time, just like you'll see a big dip next month when Legion is released and probably wont be back up till 3.4. But going back to the cash shop, that's honestly the major reason as to why the game is one of SE's highest profit major, which is also something XI never really had. Best you could do at XI's prime time was server transfer and that was once every 3 months. This game you can buy clothing, dyes, name changes, appearance changes, etc each going from 5-15$ each, which I'm guilty of over indulging in myself. So XIV isn't better because of the actual game features but the time and excess expenses that people honestly want more of since they dont believe in working for glamour (I dont want glamour to be my end game either though tbh).