90,000+ Verified Characters

Looking at some numbers today and saw over 90,000 characters have been verified with FFXIAH.com. That means 90,000 crystals were bought to make it happen. 100,000 is doable!

Oh snap!

=O

Is this where Scragg comes out and admits to having crystal mules in Jeuno on all the servers?!

90,000 characters? Think about how much money SE is makin each month from our monthly fees! (Let's just say) that there's 50K accounts that get charged ~$14 SE is makin 700K a month. I wonder what their operating costs are and what their profit margin is like. I'm sure they come in under budget!

I didn't think the scanner went above 9,000 but this is 10x that! ;)

It's not too expensive to "maintain" a MMO. However keeping it up to date with fresh updates, new content and paying service providers is another story. I believe SE released a earnings statement on FFXI recently. All I could really make out was FFXI is indeed profitable to SE.

Yeah, there was a link posted here that talked about it, actually. What I gathered from it was SE is working on a new MMO, there's no reason to be alarmed, FFXI will be around for a while, but not to expect any large expansions (like WotG and ToAU) from here on out. They are still making money on it, but they're not gonna funnel lots more money into development at this point, as the return on the investment in new accounts would probably be small.

To be honest, I wonder sometimes how SE would phase out FFXI. Would they just "hit the switch" and turn it off? Or gradually merge servers until the end? Friends and I have discussed it a few times, and what we think they should do, if they do one day decide "Ok, this is it, we're shutting down in a month", is turn on PvP, make all items free, let everyone just raise upon death with no weakness, open up all the zones to everyone, and just let those of us that are left go completely nuts. Gotta admit it'd be fun as ***, and a nice way to end the game, with everyone laughing their *** off as they killed each other over and over ^^

At any rate, here's to hoping for 100k! (this site ROCKS!) ^^

As with any business I'd imagine if something was profitable over as long a course as 6+ years, they'd milk it dry til there was nothing left to get out of it. So I would assume when Rapture is in it's full fledged peak of registered members, SE would merge servers on XI to keep things evened out, and maybe cut service when they deem it necessary due to lack of funds/registered players. However this will be a long long long time until any of those are even so much as considered by SE. You know how they are; they poke an idea with a stick for 5 years then contemplate actually doing it >.>

QFT. I lawled ^^

As long as there's enough players to maintain one server, they'll keep it open methinks.

/laugh Oh please stop making me laugh. Good one!! <rofl>..

Come on. If EQOA can have 4000(I may be wrong on this number possibly) on in one month on the PS2 no less you think FFXI is going anywhere?

For the April–September 2004 financial period, Square Enix saw online gaming, particularly Final Fantasy XI, sales increase by 101 percent and operating profit increase by 230.9 percent.[77] Revenues held steady from subscription services in the summer of 2006; in the fall however, Square acknowledged that online subscription revenues were "unsatisfactory".[78][79]

In December 2002, Square Enix president Yoichi Wada announced that there were over 200,000 subscribers to Final Fantasy XI, allowing the company to break even and start making a profit.[80] In January 2004, Square Enix announced that over 500,000 users utilizing over one million characters were playing the game. Before the release of World of Warcraft, it had the most active players of any MMORPG.[81] There were between 200,000 and 300,000 active players daily in 2006.[82] As of August 14, 2006 the Xbox 360 version was the sixth most played game on Xbox Live.[83]

Source

Better question should be this:

Out of those 90,000 people who are registered/verified here, how many of them actually still play? Meaning are still playing and did not get banned/axed for stupid ***like...say...the slavage glitch thing.

*warning* Verse On this page *warning*