Did Square just accidentally give out player numbers?Follow

How can they say the game has 5 million players on one hand and give out these slides on the other that show they have 217k a1 clears?

He figures most of players who play FFXIV have entered Alexander normal and cleared at least A1. Again though, it's 5 million registered users, not active accounts. There's a massive difference. I have a "registered" account from my 1.0 beta days, I don't use that one anymore, so it falls in that 5 million.

As for Alexander attemps/clears reflecting the population, hard to tell. Most of my end game buddies don't touch it at all as they don't see the point. I'm sure there's a ton of RPers who haven't touched it, straight up crafters/gatherers. Most people have estimated the game hovers around 300,000-500,000 which is probably still a good guess.

Edited, Aug 23rd 2015 12:20pm by Montsegurnephcreep

People need to remember, EVERY RMT account that's come and gone is a "registered" account.

The way they said on stream was how many have cleared. Essentially, there's 5 million accounts and the last word that Yoshida gave on "active players" was around 2 weeks ago when he said there's about 100k active subs per server currently..but who knows. Only a good 260k or so seem to have cleared some form of Alexander, which means either the playerbase is extremely small (very likely but of course no one would want to admit this) or based on other charts, very few people actually level to 50, let alone 60 and do capped content.

Which means business wise, Yoshida should stop spending resources on content only a small % partake in..which correct me if I'm wrong, is the crux of many arguments against a "content change."

They specifically said the 5 million number excluded trial accounts.

5 million registered accounts = 5 million box sales. It means people plunked down anywhere from $5 on Steam to $40 full retail price, got a registration code, and fed that into Mog Station. Even if 80% of those accounts are now inactive or were banned RMT bots (if you're getting a tell from a bot, that's a paid account these days) then those box sale numbers are still money in the bank for SE. That's why they are happy to say they have 5 million registered accounts, even if half of those accounts are now dead.

There are also box sales not being counted by the registration numbers, come to think of it. I have an unused PS4 collector's edition and an unused PC copy I bought from Amazon to get signed at Fan Fest last year. I'm not the only one who has multiple unused copies. It also doesn't take into account people who have registered multiple systems on the same account, since you need a different license for all platforms but they all go on the same account, regardless.



We have at least two people in my FC who got to 60 and then immediately went back to crafting and fishing after completing the story. They have no interest in Alexander. We had to drag them kicking and screaming through uncapped Coil.

Edited, Aug 23rd 2015 6:51pm by Catwho

Given the dates they gathered data it wasn't obsolete content yet. It's why I said the playerbase in all reality is actually fairly low since the ONLY reason we have "story mode" is because of the outcry by "the players that matter" wanting it..yet the turn out was still that low. Not sure how you could take your time to 60 though unless you have less than an hour to play..because the MS alone boosted you fairly quickly.



This is part of why I said if the turn out truly is that low, it's more proof they need to focus more on midgame content and far, far less on lockout based raiding content as per how people said SE shouldn't focus on a tiny majority of players :p

Edited, Aug 23rd 2015 3:59pm by Theonehio

800k sounds about right given past info and current likely trends.

You are right, that total hours played stat doesn't really make sense.

The Powerpoint clearly shows last years hours played were 823,052,919 and there was apparently an 118 times increase. When I run the numbers it is roughly the same as what they report. I suppose it is possible they screwed up the numbers or there were a lot more temporary bot accounts than projected.

Are they including hours from the Chinese client?

For a minute I thought maybe that statistic is Eorzean hours? Roughly 3 minutes to an hour. 70 minutes to 24 hours. The only trouble is, the data they gave for last years play time makes sense (roughly 105K playing full time 24/7/365). I have a feeling the data is coming straight from the servers and it isn't tampered with or inflated. I just don't know how to explain it.

I play a lot, and i still haven't reached 60 and done alex yet. There's still a lot of other (mostly crafting) stuff i'm doing. There are a couple people in my FC that only craft. You can't really look at alex clears, and decide that it must be the actual player base number. Hell, for that matter, i still haven't beaten T6. I wonder how many people never made it past 5.

Well, I mean... if they were only counting things since ARR, wouldn't that rule out anyone who played during 1.0? I'm not sure how they keep track of things like this(or why tbh), but I would think that having to sort through all this data while sifting out legacy players would be more trouble than it's worth. I'd be too lazy to do it anyway so I can't blame them if they didn't

It would seem to make sense from the company's standpoint also because 1.0 and 2.0 were merged. Of course there were new players joining and new registrations, but I think that SE counts the registered users who never made it past 1.0 simply because their data was carried over and their accounts were upgraded to ARR eligible.