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Going on to MMO; people often ask why we placed DRAGON QUEST online when it has a good chance to sell 5 million units in packaged software.
If we look at the FINAL FANTASY series, FINAL FANTASY XI (FFXI) was developed as an MMORPG, and upon recovering server and other expenses, this game generated a total of nearly ¥40 billion in its ten years of operation. With simple calculations, we can divide this figure by 10 years and see that this title generated close to $4 billion per year.While the early stages were used to recover costs, this title eventually contributed greatly to the overall revenue scheme in the latter half of its lifespan, and proved that MMORPG has a sustainable capacity over a long duration.
People said a lot of things about FFXI when it first came out in 2002. At a time when game consoles were still at their peak, we needed to exceed 2 million units to be considered a success in the FF series, however, our initial shipment of FFXI’s disks was only around 120,000. After 10 years, FFXI generated nearly ¥40 billion in accumulated earnings and still is the most profitable title in the FF series.
It took 24 months for FFXI to exceed 500K paying subscribers, as you can see in this graph. On the other hand, DQX has already exceeded 400K payment registrants within three months of its launch.
Of course, disk sales are more than this number, which shows just how many customers are purchasing the disk, connecting online, and then upgrading for paid subscription after the free trial period. Numbers are expected to continue rising, as we are still at the early stages of the game.
Results for the First Six-Month Period broke even because we have expensed the capitalized development costs into this period. We are very optimistic to see a surge in revenues in the next fiscal year.
