FFXI Reaches 500,000 Players

Wow. This was posted on the official site: "The PlayOnline service has surpassed 500,000 registered users in North America and Japan combined, with the total online community population (number of active characters) of FINAL FANTASY XI at nearly one million characters."

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Tanthalas
# Jan 10 2004 at 10:13 AM Rating: Sub-Default
ha ha eq at 400,000.. what a joke
eq alone sold over 1,000,000 copies of their game in the first month, not to mention sony has galaxies and PS going online too. and soon they will be releaseing eq2 and you will see the number of players on ff drop like a rock seeing as how most of them like myself are simply waiting for eq2 to be released.

lvl 18war/7whm
jus started plain here an there last week.
RE: Tanthalas
# Jan 11 2004 at 6:01 PM Rating: Decent
2 posts
Take off the fanboi blinders and smell reality man.

EverQuest sucks, a lot. When polled as to why people play the game, 80% responded that they play EQ because of the people they play with and the social interaction, something that's present in every game but works more for EQ because it's already popular and one is more likely to know someone who already plays EQ.

EverQuest's continuing popularity has nothing to do with it being a good game, it is popular only because it was the first 3d MMORPG and people picked it up first. It's only popular because of the snowball effect.

In reality, it's based off a crappy, bloated five year old engine that wasn't even good when it was released, gameplay is riddled with artificial time sinks, all the quests and storylines are as dry as a week old saltine, and the development is pure Monty-Haul "uberfication."

This doesn't mean Sony doesn't know what the hell they're doing, it just means that EverQuest was more or less the first of it's kind and they suffered the growing pains.

You claim everyone playing FFXI is just waiting for EQ2? Hell, most of the people I talked to while playing EQ1 said they'd never, ever buy EQ2. And guess what, EQ2 has one of the most highly anticipated games of all time to compete with: World of Warcraft. Considering that any given Blizzard game has sold exponentially more copies than EverQuest ever did, I'd say that's pretty serious competition.

But I digress; FFXI's popularity hasn't got a single thing to do with the impending release of WoW or EQ2. FFXI's success is based on the traditional formula: reputation and quality. It's my opinion that FFXI is hands down and without question a better looking, better designed, better written game than any other MMORPG out there. That is how it did in a year what it took EQ four years to do.
RE: Tanthalas
# Jan 10 2004 at 3:35 PM Rating: Default
The number discussed here is REGISTERED USERS (i.e., active subscribers), not the amount of software sold. If you want to shake fists over who has sold the most software in the RPG (MMO or otherwise) market, Squaresoft STILL beats Sony, hands down. Remember that there were TEN of these puppies, plus a bunch of relatives, before FFXI even came along.

For every person that's an active subscriber to the game, there's probably at least one other person that never bothered, or who has quit. We're talking subscribers here (the profit made from actual software sales are marginal in comparison with the monthly service fees). Everquest had 500,000 subscribers itself at last check, and now FFXI has 500,000. Think about how long it took EQ to reach that number, and then think about FFXI. The growth rate is, quite simply, MUCH faster.

FFXI is probably going to surpass Everquest, at the very least, in all numbers. It's just more global, and the name "Final Fantasy" has a lot more recognition power than Everquest does. Considering how well known EQ is...that's really saying something.

If you really want to grunt about Everquest's sisters (Star Wars Galaxies and EQ:OA), not to mention siblings that haven't even been born yet (EQ2), then you'll find that the Final Fantasy family is nothing to shake a stick at. Frankly, Final Fantasy and all of her buddies will beat most anything else around the room. ;)
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