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To be fair, Mirage, Star Citizen is coming soon and will not require a fee, nor will it require any additional costs to keep it running. It will probably have more people playing it than FFXI does. I don't think FFXI warrants the same amount of cash as FFXIV in order to play it (I'm not sure if it does anymore), because the required resources are insanly high for FFXIV by comparison. I do wonder just how many people are still hired to run FFXI, and what it is that their workload is spent on. At some point this game will stop being available, I imagine... what happens then? Will they release it so that people can play it on private servers - essentially making it a F2P game?
I won't pretend to be really wise in all things MMO, so most of these questions are genuine ones.
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Nothing is ever free. Someone is paying for it in one form or another. I'm not going to research Star Citizen's business model but I am pretty certain that it is designed to pull money out of you over a period of time in one way or another. Feel free to prove me wrong, though.
FFXI could probably be cheaper, though, and still manage to stay afloat. However, you gotta take into consideration that even if FFXI costs less to maintain, it also has a smaller subscription base. If FFXI had as many players as FFXIV and kept the same update schedule and maintenance schedule, it would probably be really easy to run it at just 4 bucks a month. However, with both a significantly smaller subscription base and also a major price cut, that's unlikely to work. Of course, only SE themselves knows for sure how much they earn from the game.
