Teo said:
FF14 has 18 servers right now with 2,500 to 3000 people playing on each server. When they start charging: $12 monthly fee x 2,500 players (at least) = $30,000 in revenue for one month on 1 server. $30,000 x 18 servers = (at least) $540,000 in revenue per month in total. $540,000 x 12 months = (at least) 6,480,000 in revenue for the first year of payment.
It's just good business. |
No, not really. 18 servers for 45k players is really bad.
You're assuming that the 6 million number is profit when it probably costs around $20,000 a month just to run a single server. Then you have to pay people to actually maintain the game so it costs more than $540,000 a month to maintain the game.
SE is losing an insane amount of money each month on this game and have been since last September. FFXIV is a massive money pit and I'm surprised on many different levels they actually released it.
Now, on to the next part -- 2,500-3,000 players per server.
If FFXIV were some free indie MMO that 45k people playing would be an impressive number but that is not what FFXIV is. It's supposed to be a major top tier MMO and that 45k people is embarrassing. The fact it's a Final Fantasy game adds onto the embarrassment. The fact that it's still free makes it an even bigger embarrassment.
And how many of those 45,000 people do you think will actually play the game once it's pay-to-play? Even if the problems were fixed it's still a bad game and not worth the monthly fee.
So, no, FFXIV is not good business at all. I honestly don't know why they still have the servers up but I would be willing to bet they'll be down by the end of the year and we'll never see a PS3 version.