Quote Originally Posted by Boa-Noah View Post
Which leaves the biggest question of where the money DOES go and why?
Theres a misunderstanding on how much the game brings in vs overhead costs and development.

Lets say there are currently around 1.5 million active subs at any given time on average. The average sub is $14 a month (Between people who do the minimum sub and people who get the max sub on top of retainers and junk). This means that FFXIV alone pulls down 21 Million Per month in subs. Assuming those subscribers spent $120 average for all expac and subsquent purchases to actually play the game, then break that over 24 (about a 2 year cycle between xpacs), that would be an additional 7.5 Million per month.

So lets say for numbers that SE pulls down 28.5 Million per month in sub fees.

Now lets start thinking about costs. An expansion for FFXIV probably is gonna cost roughly the same as most other MMOs, so ballpark figure is 50 Million to Develop. Doubling that cost seems reasonable just for basic maintenence and upkeep of the ingame assets, patches, balancing, etc. So theres 100 Million right there, per expac . Per month that translates into.... 4 Million in upkeep. Then we have to start considering SE as a company whole. SE employs roughly 4600 people. If we assume the average salary for an SE employee is an easy 40k (according to google atleast), that means employee costs per year is...184 Million or about 15 Million a month in employee costs. That puts us up to 19 Million in costs per month on just development/upkeep of FFXIV, and Employee Salaries. Thats already over half of what SE pulls in from Sub fees. Then we have to start considering Other costs. Computers and Servers cost money. Desks and resources employees use cost money. Utilities cost money. Buildings they use and rent/own cost money. Proprietary software they lease or develop costs money. Legal fees cost money. Modifications and changes to the game to be able to participate in certain markets costs money. It would not be a stretch in the least bit that all the overhead of running an actual Global business like SE per month probably ranges in the few million range. Lets say a grand total of 2.5 Million in all that nonsense. So where we at...Ah yeah, 21.5 Million per month. Then there's advertisement campaigns. Tack on another 2 Million as a safe bet and were already at 23.5 Million.

So out of 28.5 Million subs, its not unreasonable to think theyre spending 23.5 Million per month in costs. That leaves them with about a 5 million dollar wiggle room. Then we gotta tack on some more costs, cause why not. First one is that FFXIV 1.0 was a complete and utter flop. That was a huge investment that tanked. They lost money on that, not only in that the dev costs, but also investment costs. See, its not just about whether something costs 10 million or not. It's also a factor of how much that 10 million would make if it was invested into the market or other sources. So the bigger the dollar tag, the greater that hurts in reality cause thats also lost investment opportunity and time. So that is probably why weve seen or still are seeing SE operating FFXIV on a shoe string budget. Then SE also uses money cross game depts to fund other projects. So some of that 5 Million spare cash probably goes into other projects, not just FFXIV. And whatever is left probably goes into a warchest of sorts for a rainy day.


The TLDR is that While SE does pull in a lot of cash, they have a lot of expenses too. It's not like every dollar they bring in on a sub means its free to do with whatever they like. Theyre a business thta has costs. And before the "well se recorded this much in profits" point people like to say - Keep in mind that MOST businesses will inflate their income numbers to some extent by using loopholes and the like to get more investors and market interest.

As a last point - Due to a lot of the disappointment and some of that pushback with Hrothgar and Viera only being one sex each, as well as both species being hyper limited in customization, I honestly wouldnt be surprised if part of the reason why it went down to 1 dungeon per patch and why some of the content seems more limited and recycled this xpac in many ways might very well be to correct the customization issues at the least (if not the potential, albeit slim, of having Fem Hrothgars and Male Viera). Im not saying that is whats going on, but it would explain some of it. Unless SE is going through some weird economic turmoil, it wouldnt be in there interest to cut funding to the dev team even further as FFXIV is a good source of continuous monthly revenue for the company.