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Square Enix President Looks To Online Play

Posted by Zonk on from the where-it's-at dept.

Gamespot has a story detailing comments by Square Enix president Youichi Wada. In the article, they touch on the fact that Square is going to be increasingly looking to online play in their future games. From the article: "Wada predicted that online games will be Square Enix's main source of income in the future. 'I think that over half of our income and profit will be based on network content [including games] by 2008 or 2009.'"

1 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Haven't they already "looked to online play"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    FFXI has an estimated 500,000 subscribers. WoW has a known 1.25 MILLION subscribers. FFXI's figures are estimated because - well, they haven't bothered releasing the damned figures in over six months!

    And that's really strange, too, since they've released an expansion pack AND released in Europe since they last announced their figures. Why the hell haven't they announced that they're up past the 500,000 figure? Why not say "600,000" with the European release?

    Because, most likely, they AREN'T. It's actually quite likely that with the release of EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft that they LOST a lot of subscribers, maybe as much as a quarter of all subscribers, even when counting the increase of subscribers from the European release.

    WoW hit DOUBLE their MAXIMUM subscription figures in THREE MONTHS. FFXI did that in TWO YEARS. I'd say WoW annihilated FFXI in popularity.

    But seriously, who cares? FFXI was only the "largest non-Korean MMORPG around" because of Japan. PC MMORPGs just aren't that popular in Japan, and so with FFXI being basically the only console MMORPG in town, it's not surprising that the Japanese inflated it's subscription figures. If you ignore that effect, you're down to like 200,000 subscribers - much less popular than EverQuest.

    Simply put, FFXI is like Lineage. It may be popular "someplace else" but it never was popular in America or Europe. It simply isn't effectively competeing in the market World of Warcraft is.

    By the way, it's been well known that Square intends to heavily enter the MMORPG market. Their PlayOnline service is basically an MMORPG subscription service, designed to give them a backend to run multiple MMORPGs at once. Hell, even FFXI contained a tech-demo of the service, Tetra Master (which, I'm please to say, I had to look up). They already have two more games planned on that service: Front Mission Online and Fantasy Earth. And, possibly, the Japanese release of EverQuest 2.