FFXI To End In 2010?

Services and items are supposed to cost money not be handed out for free. I smell unemployment

What's next? Supermarkets should give you food? You should get a place to live for free?

Okay, okay, I'll stop lurking here. D:

World of Warcraft isn't free to play. I know, i had a wow account for a while earlier this year. Costs about as much per month as ffxi as I recall but you don't have to pay for each additional character.

WoW is 16 bucks a month, lol. More than XI.

FFXI x 8 years of 12.95 subscribers per person = 1243.20 per person or more if they have more mules.

Oh yeah... they're going broke alright. Stop supporting square enix's claims. If you don't work for them you have no right to state their status. Unless they publicly announce they do, then I can agree with your claims.

You have to think of big business. For a huge corp. like SE, a million dollars isn't a lot to have, but IS a lot to lose.

way to not acknowledge that you were totally wrong about wow being free.

I smell an idiot. Get some sense of business and economics before complaining about being charged money for a game. Also, no one is forcing you to play the damn game. You made that decision.

Well do realize like 70% of the XI population are mules. c.c (of course this is a random number out of my *** but you get the picture)

They have expenses as well, just like all business. It's not like that was 100% profit. Expenses such as paying their staff to create new content and new games.

Also, the economy doesn't just effect individuals but businesses as well.

You should just quit before you sound like a fool. lol

Yeah cause that's a huge sum of money over 8 years... oh wait that is my MONTHLY rent. How bout this. How about you go apply to work for SE and tell them you will work for free in order to help lower there cost. Then I might take you seriously.

Then again your attitude is of something that doesn't have a job and probably never has had one

Honestly, we should be lucky SE didn't RAISE their monthly price to adjust for the economy.

Oh that's long over, lol.
He's just spewing out nonsense now.

Sshh I was just trying to be nice and convince him to stop lol

Taken from wikipedia:

The idea to develop Final Fantasy XI as an online game was conceived by Hironobu Sakaguchi when establishing Square Pictures headquarters in Hawaii. Impressed by western MMORPGs that he discovered there, such as EverQuest, Sakaguchi convinced Square to begin the development of their own MMORPG and suggested that it be based on the Final Fantasy series.[36] The team responsible for Chrono Cross was assigned to the development of Final Fantasy XI after the English localization of the former title.[37] The game was the first developed under Square's new philosophy to develop for "all platforms and media".[38] Hiromichi Tanaka, the producer of the game, has stated Final Fantasy XI is heavily influenced by Final Fantasy III, especially in its battle and magic systems.[20] According to Tanaka, Square put in Final Fantasy XI what they could not put in the first Final Fantasy titles due to technical limitations, thus making Final Fantasy XI the "most [representative] Final Fantasy of all the installments".[37] The game was developed and ran on the Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti GPU, which the President of Square Yōichi Wada described as the most powerful graphics processor available at the time.[39] The game cost two to three billion yen (~$17–25 million) to create along with the PlayOnline Network Service and was assumed to become profitable over a five year timespan.[40] By creating a unified game world instead of different ones balkanized by language, development costs were cut 66%.[41][42] Since recurring monsters of the series are known by different names in the Japanese and English versions of the other installments, it was decided for Final Fantasy XI to use both Japanese and English names for different varieties of the same monsters.[41]

It was originally announced that there would be a simultaneous release on the PlayStation 2 and PC as well as concurrent Japanese and American release, but this was later changed.[43] There was also discussion of an Xbox release, but it was abandoned mainly because of its small 8 GB hard drive.[9] Originally announced in January 2000 at the Yokohama Millennium Conference, there was a great deal of negative press.[44] There were questions raised about naming the game the eleventh in the series, since it was not clear whether the game would have a structured story, which it ended up having, and the title of Final Fantasy Online was suggested.[45] Following an August 2001 beta test in Japan, a public Japanese beta test was done in December 2001.[46]

Following its PC release, Final Fantasy XI was listed as one of IGN's most anticipated PlayStation 2 games of 2004.[47] Sony launched a multi-million dollar ad campaign to promote Final Fantasy XI along with the PlayStation 2 hard drive add-on which the game required.[48] Having been released on the PlayStation 2 as well as the personal computer, it became the first cross-platform MMORPG ever created.[49] On June 14, 2002, the game server was down for four hours for maintenance to the database servers, bug fixes on the text interface, and a new patch for the game client.[50] This is thought to be the first patch ever released for a console game.[51] Other early issues included complaints by American players that experienced Japanese players had already completed all the quests. Square Enix responded by adding new servers in order to have game worlds with fewer expert players.[15]

Final Fantasy XI is one of the first cross-console video games, and has continued to update its software to allow the game to run on new consoles. Square Enix noted that Nintendo's use of "friend codes" was the primary reason Final Fantasy XI was not brought to the Wii.[52] In December 2006, the PlayStation 2 versions of PlayOnline and Final Fantasy XI were able to install and run on the PlayStation 3. The Vana'diel Collection 2008 discs for the PlayStation 2 had installation issues on the PlayStation 3, causing them to be unusable at first since they weren't on Sony's list of HDD compatible titles in the firmware the PlayStation 3 at the time. This problem was fixed on December 18, 2007 when Sony released firmware update 2.10 for the PlayStation 3. This allowed all backwards compatible models - 20 gig model #CECHB01, 60 Gig model #CECHA01 and 80 gig model #CECHE01 - to play FFXI. After working with Microsoft to resolve Final Fantasy XI's incompatibility issues with Windows Vista, Square Enix released a downloadable version of the PlayOnline client which is compatible with the operating system, although small bugs have appeared.[53]

According to this, there's been 3 years of profit now. I can't say for sure if this is true or not seeing as I don't have SE's numbers but let's assume it is. That means 3 years of profit and probably minimal profit at that. So 10+ years of work for 7 years with no profit. But you want them to not charge money for it even though they're still dumping money into the game 10+ years later.

Well that ends this dicussion.

Hm. None of the local hardasses seem to be around, so I guess I'll say it.

Are you HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE? This is one of the dumbest things I have read on these forums. SE isn't around to make us happy. They're here to make money. So for them, FF isn't a game, it IS a business/career. If they CAN get people to pay 15$ a month, why would they not? If they wanted to make a game w/ no monthly fees, they'd make a non MMO and charge $60 for it. How much is the new premium package thing of FF11? 20$? How on earth do you expect them to make a profit on that. Forget profit, they wouldn't even come close to covering the costs of development, advertising, server maintenance, etc.

XI plus mules, I pay about that much. Might not have been clear but yeah, that's what I meant.

I didn't have any mules so yeah. But even then, a mule just costs $1 to make it, right? It doesn't tack onto the monthly fee does it?

Nope it's an extra 1 dollar a month.

Oh, bleh. Either way, that's optional.

SE has been doing bad for years and is finally starting to do good again. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/square-enix-holdings-co-ltd-reports-nine-month-financial-results-83785322.html.

For those of you that can't convert yen to USD that is an forecasted 85 million profit for the Fiscal year ending in march 10. Which sounds like alot until you look and see that there total sales for the year was like 1.5 billion . Sounds like they have plenty of cost to maintain existing products and develop more and actually need the revenue to me

Still, $13 per month with or without mules isn't that much for people to be arguing about wanting it to go free though, is it? Not breaking my bank. XD

Not at all. It's a little more expensive than other MMOs and a little cheaper than some.

Lol if that is breaking anyones bank you need to either:

1. Put the game down and go out and find some work.

2. Re-evaluate your spending vs income.

For those of us not jobless I think it will be mostly number 2.

Did you just spend $14 on a single meal in that month? Then yep that alone would've paid for your subscription.

Do you eat out more than 3 times a month? Well making yourself a sandwich or eating ramen instead would've paid for your subscription.

Did you get that $30k car when you know all you really need is something to get you from point A to B and your friend was selling his clunker for $2k... that would've paid for your entire FF career.

The list goes on and on. $14 a month is nothing. If you are reallly conerned about that then you are in some pretty dire straights where playing an online game should be the least of your worries. Most pan-handlers will make alot more than the montly subscription fee in a hour. It is and always will be by far the smallest bill I have. It cost alot less than cable TV and keeps me more entertained.

As long People play FFXI they wont shut down the Servers

As long as a profitable amount play. :P

Think about it this way...i would say most players would be considered addicted to FFXI, but in comparison to something like lets say smoking it is considerably cheaper by quite a bit $7-8 a pack in NJ most people smoke a pack a day...I pay $13 a month for my "fun" compared to literally hundreds...stop whining about a minimal cost for endless entertainment!

This, I don't see anything wrong with the amount of people playing right now.

The amount of people per server though might be starting to get a little slim. I think they're probably waiting on the right time to start combining servers though. Doing it before 14 says, "game's dying, accept it, boo hoo." After 14 though would be more likely to translate into "We just released our new mmo, we're just cutting back on this one to support that one but over all we're still going decently strong."


Exactly. Other hobbies cost a lot more.

Scrapbooking for instance, if you're heavy into it you'll end up spending around $50 per month on paper not counting the other supplies you'd need. I know it's a girly hobby but still.

Even the average gamer going through loads of 1player console games in a year's time is insanely more expensive than one mmo.

I'm curious of what the economy would look like if they were to merge remaining servers. :o