It's That Time Again!

So would I and so would many others. That's not at all the point.

Let's do some simple math.

There is a 6 people team in SE that are still working on FFXI these days.
According to FFXI AH there are 127K active accounts as of last week.

Considering the average monthly fee around 20$ (Wardrobes / transfer / mules) it is a 2 540 000 $ of monthly revenue and a year turnover of around 30 m$ still generated by the game.
If you subtract the charges of the 6 people team – assuming a generous salary charge of 2m$ annually you still get a 28m$ but margin in SE's P&L.

We would need to add another 2m$ charge for maintenance, servers & marketing costs. And for the sake of being as exhaustive as possible we can subtract an extra 1m$ for various charges (computers, development pack, rent for allocated space etc.).
We can safely assume that there are no other amortizations ongoing for an 18 years old game. That is a roughly 25m$ of positive impact in SE’s earnings before income taxes yearly.

I’d say: quite substantial, even for an estimation.

My point being, we give SE plenty of reasons to be more honest and transparent with us player instead of this obscure “ok” / “not ok” ban procedures, at least from a purely financial point of view.

I already do a worst case scenario of this math, on the fly, here. FFXI is still profitable, but I don't believe it's that profitable. My gut-level guess is it's somewhere in the 6-8m/year of profit range.

Like you said, their costs are fixed and relatively small, but I would be pretty shocked if there were 127k active accounts - we show 105k characters right now - and those accounts definitely aren't all in the $20/mo bracket.

I'd feel embarrassed ever having to resort to using such a banal recycled semi-slight as, "calm down"....

For Christ's sake take a chill pill... Also, stop reading the forums, the ***is seriously *** with you.... Good grief Charlie Brown. All posts with an opinion =\= people being aggressively worked up. Bitching about other people's opinions on a forum whilst leaving an even more worthless reply bitching about bitching in the heart of it, tums tu-tu-tuh-tummmmmmmmmmmmmms.

According to this site, SEs MMO Division had a 180M profit in the last fiscal year. That is counting FFXI, FFXIV, and Dragon Quest X. I am not sure of the popularity of DQX, but even if FFXI only made up 5% of that margin, thats still ~9M profit per year.

https://mmos.com/news/square-enix-reports-2020-earnings-mmo-division-reports-record-high-revenues-and-profits

Considering how profitable FFXI was a decade ago, with SE calling it their most profitable game ever, I am shocked that they developed a whole new game, vs taking FFXI, redoing it for the modern age, with HD graphics, tweaked gameplay, and an overall enhancement. This would have allowed them to make their best game better, and allow for years of future expansions, like Seekers, going into the other continents, and exploring the vast lore that they invested so much time developing in the early days.

While there are many multiboxers in this game, there are many more people here who only play a single character. You might find a random person with 15 other characters in the same account but I think the vast majority of players have 3 characters or less per account. I may be wrong but I don’t think it is off the mark to be honest.

As far as I know, I are the only person in my linkshell with greater than 5 characters on my account, but I do not have multiple accounts.

So, I think the average annual profit from FFXI is closer to 8 mil per year. It may be as high as 10 mil. I will look at their annual reports to see if they actually break it out on there though.

They havn't updated FFXI's graphics, interface, and such YET.

Please look forward to it.

Oh, sure. Like, I myself am an exception to the database page math, because I have both wardrobes, 16 characters on my account, and I only even show up in the active column once a year (if that!). The database page math is a response to me getting the "is FFXI losing money?!" question that pops up now and then, and is meant to show definitively that it does not.

FFXI makes enough money for them to justify keeping it alive. Not enough for them to justify caring about it.

Super Smash brothers melee is arguably a more popular and roughly an even older game with dozens of partnered streamers, and Nintendo routinely tells its players to move on.

I misread the information, I thought it was a total /account.
So yeah, my estimation was bullish.
However, even with 6 to 10m$, it is still very high for a game this old.

I would still hope for more: development, content, consideration.

tons of things are still written in cobalt, guess that should be the only language taught in schools.

jokes aside ffxi is old and probably hard to work with, they moved on to ff14. they could have arguably given ffxi more resources somewhere around adoulin but i'm guessing they had business reasons not to

Honestly, they don't even mention much on MMOs in their annual report, except a few mentions of FFXIV and DQX.

There is only one little blurb on MMOs on the actual audited statements, and it only pertains to risk factors:


So, honestly, we will never know exactly how much FFXI brings in. I do see that they are making a better gross profit % than most other multinationals, so....

Time to buy some SE stock.

If you give people too much information, they will abuse the rules right upto that line.

So you don't give them information and they never know where the line is.

saying that also questions me we are over-analysing neglection

2 sides of every coin.

They release info on why people are getting banned and the majority of people stop using said addons/plugins because they know what is ban worthy and what is "allowed". Or they don't care and continue to use said plugins or walk the thin line by finding ways around it. Which let's be honest... most people would do this most likely lol. At least that way there wouldn't be an excuse of not knowing.

One could argue that not releasing info is part of the problem. You can also argue that using anything puts you at risk in the first place and its not their problem to warn you. I dont use ja0, pos hacking, gearswap, send, etc... but I have tons of videos as proof on my channel that I am running windower with addons on my screen. I play pretty close to vanilla with equipsets and mainly visual upgrades such as xivparty and xivhotbar. I haven't had an issue with being banned yet so am I wrong to assume it's okay to use said addons, or am I just lucky they haven't pulled the trigger yet? That's part of the problem with not releasing info on what's causing a ban. Communication is always important. Lack of communication causes more problems than it solves.

I mean, they've already said that ANY third party tool is actionable. It's not like they ever said "well, ffxidb is fine, but no gearswap".

Their stance is clear. Don't mistake negligent/selective enforcement for a hall pass.

I mean, like others say, if you have a policy of "Do any of this, you will be banned" like SE does, you aren't going to release information that says "Ok, we deleted these characters because they were using XXX program only". That gives people the notion that XXY program is allowed, when it isn't.

On that note, there is a pattern they have if anyone noticed it yet. The majority of players who are getting hit are those who automate actions or alter states, not those who are only using QoL improvements.

I mean, one can make an argument that Gearswap is an automated tool, but in all honesty, it's really QoL improvement tool. I have yet to see anyone claim that they were banned because of Gearswap, but those who are banned do have Gearswap or some similar program, along with whatever else they have that most likely caused the ban.

Long story short, Thorny's tier post sums it up nicely.

Yeeeaaaaaaa, calm down.

I believe you found the FFXIAH forum motto.

No, the motto is "One will argue".

One could argue that, but, I would argue that people need to calm down.

Quit arguing son, and calm down.

I was calm until you told me to calm down.

Actually, it depends.

It might cost 400 M to redo FFXI, it might not. It all really depends on several factors, such as real programming costs (are we talking about a true reboot/remaster, or are we talking about upgrading graphics hardware and code), advertising costs, anticipated additional subscription income, and other factors that, honestly, I cannot think of on the fly.

I agree with you that it probably won't justify SE into modernizing FFXI, but not for the reasons you outlined. My opinion is that FFXI is literally a cash cow that would have a net profit ratio of greater than 75%. Why would they mess with that????

It's embedded.