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.