40k or 12k it doesn't make much of a difference. That's only 1-5 million dollars a year in revenue. They made $40M off the launch selling retail boxes. And at one time there were 600,000 players not 47k. The 47k is talking about October 2010.

12k is about right. I'd say it's actually about 10k and the extra 2 thousand are here to check the new patch out. I knew there were 27k players in December 2010, and if you go by your old linkshells there's less than 1/3 of your friends still playing. Approximately 1/3 of 27k is 9k or so. I'd say 5 or 6 thousand people are going to stay and pay the fee for the next year. I just don't see why they want to close the extended free trial for, as Jon Stewart would say in Death to Smoochy, asswipe money. On the other hand, this game has such a bad stigma that anyone willing to check it out is likely to suffer so much peer pressure that the population is unlikely to grow before 2.0 anyway. Still, if I were them, which I'm not, I would keep the extended free trial going and just count the lost potential income as money out of the existing Final Fantasy war chest.

To give you an idea of the trade off I'm talking about, to pay for FFXIV to not start charging it's miniscule playerbase for the entire year in 2012, they only have to set aside 28,800 copies of FFXIII-2 to make up for it.