Also of note that FFXI has been highly profitable the game basically has no new content and people still play it.
While I completely agree and acknowledge that it basically costs them nothing to run and it makes them money, this is SE and Japanese business we are talking about here. Irrationality is not uncommon in Japanese business decisions as of recent years, and nor do SE have a history of making entirely rational decisions.
I would suspect there are 20,000 live accounts (not all frequent players) at this point which makes them about $300,000 a month (avg $15). If only they had taken a lot of the sadism out years ago by adding Home Point warping in earlier and Mounts etc, they could have been making tons of money on the game.