FFXI's Vana'diel Gets Census, Re-Confirms 500,000 Players

Thanks to SirBruce for pointing to Square Enix's official Final Fantasy XI census survey, recently revealed since "May 16, 2004 marks the second anniversary of Final Fantasy XI's Japanese launch." The piece re-confirms that "the number of active Final Fantasy XI players (or, the number of paying customers with at least one character) has topped 500,000", and goes on to look at log-in distribution ("Japanese logins peak at around 11 p.m [but] the North American peak time occurs on a relatively smooth spread of 10 or 12 hours [largely due to] the 3-hour time difference that exists between North America's two coasts"), and job type distribution ("the warrior dominates the charts.") In a related story, Terra Nova discusses an economic research paper on Final Fantasy XI, which notes: "There is a pricing differential in exactly the same object depending on the time of day. This corresponds with the times that Japanese and North American users log on."

Comments

Economic Research...

[notamac]

I stopped reading the article about "economic research" right around the moment I noticed the word "coz."

Wow, bigger than EQ?

[DrEldarion]

Damn, last time I heard, EverQuest had around 420,000 active players. Could FFXI really be more popular than EQ now? Amazing.

Re:Wow, bigger than EQ?

[ajutla]

It's not really that surprising. FF has incredibly huge brand recognition, after all. Besides, EQ is getting kind of old/stale--at least, that's what people tell me. I don't play any MMO games myself (out of lack of money) but many of my friends have switched to FFXI simply because they've been playing EQ too long. Hell, if I could afford it, I would definitely be playing FFXI right now. The game looks really slick.

Re:Wow, bigger than EQ?

[Joe Tie.]

I wouldn't say it's all that steep in terms of system requirements. Mine's an old clunker - 850mhz with 128mb ram and a GF4mx and I still managed to get fair performance from it.

Census is good, but live feed?

[pat_trick]

The census is awesome information, but it seems that the live feed at http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/multimedia/wind/ is a little bit...broken?

Time + Money Commitment

[hiei]

I'd love to give FFXI a try, as well as City of Heroes, but the time and money involved to even try out the game is quite discouraging. $50 for either game on PC, and on PS2, FFXI costs $100, (more if you need the network adapter) PLUS the monthly fee. It also seems that any mmorpg game requires a greater time commitment than any other type of game, and with school, work, my own projects, and the desire to actually sleep regularly, I just don't have time to check them out. Anyone think that mmo-games will eventually move to design that will allow people to enjoy the game without sinking in massive amounts of hours? And as far as try-before you buy, I really like what they did with the Guild Wars test this week during E3, it'd be awesome if more companies could arrange for test sessions like that (segregated from the actual online world if they wanted) that would allow you to get a feel for the game before sinking in the time and money investment and then deciding 2 weeks later you don't like it.

Monthly prices!

[Mukaikubo]

My big hangup with MMORPGs is and always has been the price. I simply refuse to play a game where I might end up paying 200$ for a year's enjoyment as opposed to a nice strategy game where I might pay 50$ for a year's enjoyment. If it weren't for that, I'd be so deep into FFXI that it would take mole-men to dig me out.