Not so Final
Some 3-day-old news about a cross-territory VW.
On 7th January, Square Enix announced that its PlayOnline service (ie. basically Final Fantasy XI Online) hit 500,000 registered users in North America and Japan combined. Final Fantasy XI now has an online population of "nearly a million" characters. How much bigger that's going to get when hordes of PS2 users come on stream in March is anyone's guess.
It would be interesting to discover what proportion of these 500,000 users are based in Japan and the USA respectively.
Final Fantasy XI was Gamespy's PC MMORPG of the year 2003.
500,000 is over 200,000 more than the population of Iceland.
Richard
Posted by Richard Bartle on January 10, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
I find it rather interesting how mainstream MMORPG's are getting. For instance, back when I was playing Ultima Online in ~1999 pretty much everyone I knew scoffed at the idea of playing in a Virtual World (and of course paying $10 per month to play). But now a lot of those some people are playing Anarchy Online, FFXI and Star Wars Galaxies.
It'd be interesting to see a MMOG population growth chart from MUD1 to right now. Anybody know of any online resources that could aid in creation of such a chart?
- ojuice
Posted Jan 10, 2004 2:31:24 PM | link
This is what most everyone uses:
http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce/Subscriptions.html
Starts Jan 97 tho so only about 20 years of back data to fill in.
ren
www.renreynolds.com
Posted Jan 10, 2004 7:14:25 PM | link
A few people I talk to have commented that there might be a bit of trickery going on here. Supposedly "PlayOnline" accounts remain around even if you're not playing, so the 500k figure could be taken to mean "500k people have signed up for the game at one point". While still an impressive number, it's not quite as impressive as "500k people are actively paying for the game".
A comment,
Posted Jan 10, 2004 9:52:34 PM | link
The milestone is a great achievement, but I'm waiting on the console numbers...
Also, with the data on the split in subscription numbers, Final Fantasy XI may warrant a slot on the 100K Group US.
Frank
Posted Jan 10, 2004 11:11:47 PM | link
Ojuice>It'd be interesting to see a MMOG population growth chart from MUD1 to right now. Anybody know of any online resources that could aid in creation of such a chart?
It was hard enough at the time figuring out how many players MUD1 had, let alone doing so over a sustained period.
Part of the problem is defining what counts as a "player". The Sirbruce charts use "registered users", but as Brian has pointed out even that has multiple definitions (we want "currently-registered users" whereas PlayOnline may have given us "ever-registered numbers"). There are other tricks companies play, too, particularly if their own set-up looks better under one metric than another (eg. "registered accounts").
Richard
Posted Jan 11, 2004 5:15:56 AM | link
Magicback>Also, with the data on the split in subscription numbers, Final Fantasy XI may warrant a slot on the 100K Group US.
Yes, that's what I was wondering, too. The influx of US users seems to have been what pushed it over the 500K limit. It was claiming 280,000 prior to its US launch, so if 50% or more of the new arrivals were from the US it could indeed claim membership of the US 100K club.
Richard
Posted Jan 11, 2004 5:19:16 AM | link
Richard> 500,000 is over 200,000 more than the population of Iceland.
Does this mean we need to start exporting gamers to Iceland?
Posted Jan 12, 2004 10:05:01 AM | link
Alan Stern>Does this mean we need to start exporting gamers to Iceland?
No, it means that we can claim a seat at the UN.
Richard
Posted Jan 13, 2004 12:25:56 PM | link
