All I can say is wow!
PlayOnline Nets 400,000 Subscribers
By David Smith
11/20/2003Square Enix has racked up 430,000 subscribers to its PlayOnline online gaming service worldwide, the publisher announced at its midterm press conference today. The service, which powers Square's MMORPG Final Fantasy XI, broke through the 400,000 user mark approximately 18 months after its Japanese debut in May 2002.
The recent release of Final Fantasy XI for the PC in the United States of course provided a significant boost to the service's user base. Square Enix said it has shipped around 200,000 copies of the PC version to the US market already, and picked up around 100,000 new subscribers so far.The boost to FFXI's player base provided by the American version brings it into the highest echelon of MMORPG popularity. It's now surprisingly close to Sony Online Entertainment's market-leading EverQuest, which claims a base of more than 500,000 subscribers.
I think EQ is 500,000 in the US alone.
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I''m pretty sure thats EQ''s world wide total.
Just to back up my statement here is a SOE press release from August:
As of the end of August EQ only had 430k. Of course if EQ has 430k and they only had 500k total users between all their games as of August, what does this say for Planetside and SWG?
OVER 500,000.
Could be 599,000 for all we know =)
At any rate, good for Square. There are a lot of people playing MMORPGs these days.
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
redfang#1780
True, still not even close to the over a million mark for SWG some analysts were predicting.
Oh cmon, Stric9, dont tell me you gave them any credit?
Hahaha, dont you have to have some semblance of a game in order to get that many subscribers?
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
redfang#1780
LOL Let us just pause a moment and consider what the analysts predicted for the SIMS On-line prior to release....
-Griffon
Did Samurai Jack ever get back to the past?
Well I did give them my credit card for a time But considering I haven''t seen any published numbers for SWG I thought it might be fun to see what inferences could be made from the data here. The other thing to note is how long SWG was on the top ten games sold list. I think it was there for well over a month, obviously meaning many people have cancelled their accounts. I guess no big surprises here, but interesting to see it sort of confirmed.
I''m pretty convinced that this will become much more common for a while. churn in MMORPG''s will continue to increase as folks get fed up with same old same ol'' and then hop to the next one as it releases looking for something new. Good for box sales but not so good for long term subscriptions. I guess the fork in the road will be either good/fun/content rich games show up or the whole system crashes down and nobody buys them anymore. Sadly I don''t think either group is clever enough to fix the problem so it will likely continue on for good while.
-Griffon
Did Samurai Jack ever get back to the past?