FFXIV and the Income

[Jeeqbit]

I did some maths during the last tier and it was actually cleared by 29.8% of active players who cleared the normal raids. By the end of the tier, this figure was quite a bit higher. 55% in JP, 35% on Aether and 20% on Crystal. Most places had at least 20% except a few really dead worlds/data centers and the lowest was 11% on Kraken. FFXIVCollect is unreliable because most of the players in its tally are inactive players from potentially years ago who may not even have subscribed since Shadowbringers. This is just people who cleared M4S; it doesn't include people who only cleared 1-3 which will be even higher. So the engagement with Savage is way higher than people believe.

Regarding sub numbers, we know Lucky Bancho shows around 900,000 but we also know from various historical data points that the alt character rate can be around 11-20%. It seems to fluctuate based on the time in the patch cycles. It's hard to say when but at some point people bring out all their raid alts to help people clear Savage, or people make new characters for fun, maybe during content lulls.

If you look at SE's financial reports, they make a lot more than the estimated subscribers, suggesting a significant amount of retainer subs or people who subscribe but don't actually play (sort of like subscribing to Netflix and never watching anything). Another possibility is SE just isn't very good at creating accurate financial reports - the reports are not at all consistent with subscriptions, sometimes showing dives well below estimated subscriber numbers, which suggests they don't necessarily put all financial data into their quarterly reports and delay it until the next one.

But on a core level, let's look at it:
900,000 x $14.99 x 12 months = $161,892,000 per year

It's estimated there are 300 people working on the game. So:
$161,892,000 - ($80,748 x 300) = $137,667,600 remaining per year

But let's assume this covers all their 4,770 employees and that nothing else funds them such as base game sales, expansion sales, merch, mogstation, FF7R, FF16, re-releases, DQ or other releases:

$161,892,000 - ($80,748 x 4,770) = $-223,275,960 remaining per year

So subscription fees alone can't, in theory, fund all 4,770 Square Enix employee wages, but it can fund CBU3 specifically with plenty to spare. Of course, there are server costs and taxes to consider. However, base game sales, expansion sales, merch, mogstation, FF7R, FF16, re-releases, DQ or other releases also help.

I did make an assumption about their wages. Some of their wages will be really low (graduates), while others will be really high due to experience or highly skilled roles, so I just assumed a pretty high wage across the board - some may be more and some less.