via Gamasutra.

Square Enix was hoping the reboot of its troubled Final Fantasy XIV MMO would prove worthwhile – but the company hadn't estimated just how successful the reboot would prove.

Final Fantasy XIV originally released in 2010, and was panned by critics and players alike. In response to the criticism, Square Enix decided to completely revamp and re-release the title as A Realm Reborn earlier this year – and it proved so popular, that the servers were unable to take the strain.

Now the company has revised its earnings forecast for the first half of the current fiscal year, noting that profits far surpass what it was expecting for the period.

Where Square Enix had originally estimated losses of up to 1.3 billion yen ($13.2 million) for the six months ended September 30, 2013, the company says that it has instead turned a profit, roughly in the region of 2.6 billion yen ($26.5 million).

It wasn't just A Realm Reborn that helped this swing to profits, however. Overall game sales in North America exceeded expectations, while the company's efforts to reduce costs have been successful.

However, the company was keen to stress that it has not revised its full year results as-of-yet, "mainly due to the uncertainties in the second half of the fiscal year." You can expect Square Enix's full six-month fiscal results to drop sometime in the coming weeks.

Happy news since more money means more support and content for the game :)

FFXI had the full support of SE and it became one of the greatest games of it's age for it, this liekly means that while SE was kinda brushing XIV off before now their execs are going to jump on the more money bandwagon. This actually worries me because that means less control will be in the hands of gamers (yoshi P) and decisions will be made to appease fans and make money rather than to make a good game which ironicaly tends to drop pprofits dramatically (WoW and SWG anyone?) Well hopefully my fears are not confirmed and are unwarranted,

600,000 subs. That's peak FFXI numbers right there.

I think this was apparent with the amount of users in open beta and early access alone. They severely underestimated the initial popularity of 2.0, but I don't blame them for it after 1.0.