We lost 70% of our player base half a year in

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Originally Posted by Padudu

Idt Steam is an accurate telll btw. You'd have a better metric with LuckyBancho.. I think that's what it's called. Also, you're not accounting for the fact that December 2021 was the EW launch, so of course the population was higher. We're now having small drips of content in between the big patches, I believe.

Also, not sure if the game is "dying and on its way out", especially since WoW is still kickin' after 93384839 controversies, lol I doubt this game dies faster than WoW or even RuneScape.

I wasn't around for SB-era XIV, but wasn't the population lower than it is these days, despite the hype for this game dying?

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The WoW influx is a complete fluke. The population is going to start declining as the WoW players slowly get bored and move on.

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Originally Posted by icemage

Those are wrong numbers, they are from Steam. Most players play with the official launcher. The game is as active as ever and this doomsaying has got to stop.

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Originally Posted by Zanarkand-Ronso

Why yes, I can log in and play the game without a stupid long queue.
Certanly, the numbers have dipped after a few months and will fluctuate between patches, and when the next expansion comes there will be a HUGE flux of players for 2 months before the dip and flux again...the same as it always has for the past 6 years.

Game is doing fine.
Stop with the Doomsaying

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All white knights can do is describe real facts and statistics as "doomsaying".

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Originally Posted by hunkygladiator

All white knights can do is describe real facts and statistics as "doomsaying".

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Context is very important.

Fact 1- We had a huge influx of people between 2020 and 2022.

Fact 2- Endwalker dropped in December of 2021

Fact 3- If the Steam population is large enough, it could potentially be considered as a viable proxy for the population as a whole.

Fact 4- The game has a proven cycle of boom-and-bust regarding player activity.

Fact 5- Relative to the large spikes in active players, the game has traditionally had a fairly small percentage of people who consistently sub and play the game between major patches.

Fact 6- The overall number of players has steadily increased since launch.

https://i.imgur.com/TmqxwuZ.png

https://i.imgur.com/Vw5HFuF.png


Taking all of this in context. If you compare the number of players at Endwalker's launch vs the number of people playing now; absolutely, there's been a massive loss of active players. However, it's not the best example to use for one major reason: the anomalously high number of people starting the game due to the WoW exodus. However, if you look at the number of current players now vs. the number of players in 2015, you'll see that there's been a slow, but steady, increase of people playing the game regularly (daily/weekly), so no, the game's not losing massive numbers of regular players. It may very well be losing WoW Refugees as they return to WoW or find other games that are more appealing, but they were outliers any way so a loss of a high percent of them doesn't really factor into discussions of player base decline. What will be telling is how many of those people stay with the game and how the population of regular players increases over the course of the rest of the 6.X cycle.

It's not White Knighting to say the game's not dying and any assertions to the contrary are Doomsaying. If the Steam numbers are a valid reflection of the general player base (given the trends, it looks like they are), then the game is in no way dying even if recent player numbers of the anomalously large player base at Endwalker's launch show a dramatic decline.

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Originally Posted by Illmaeran

Context is very important.

Fact 1- We had a huge influx of people between 2020 and 2022.

Fact 2- Endwalker dropped in December of 2021

Fact 3- If the Steam population is large enough, it could potentially be considered as a viable proxy for the population as a whole.

Fact 4- The game has a proven cycle of boom-and-bust regarding player activity.

Fact 5- Relative to the large spikes in active players, the game has traditionally had a fairly small percentage of people who consistently sub and play the game between major patches.

Fact 6- The overall number of players has steadily increased since launch.

https://i.imgur.com/TmqxwuZ.png

https://i.imgur.com/Vw5HFuF.png


Taking all of this in context. If you compare the number of players at Endwalker's launch vs the number of people playing now; absolutely, there's been a massive loss of active players. However, it's not the best example to use for one major reason: the anomalously high number of people starting the game due to the WoW exodus. However, if you look at the number of current players now vs. the number of players in 2015, you'll see that there's been a slow, but steady, increase of people playing the game regularly (daily/weekly), so no, the game's not losing massive numbers of regular players. It may very well be losing WoW Refugees as they return to WoW or find other games that are more appealing, but they were outliers any way so a loss of a high percent of them doesn't really factor into discussions of player base decline. What will be telling is how many of those people stay with the game and how the population of regular players increases over the course of the rest of the 6.X cycle.

It's not White Knighting to say the game's not dying and any assertions to the contrary are Doomsaying. If the Steam numbers are a valid reflection of the general player base (given the trends, it looks like they are), then the game is in no way dying even if recent player numbers of the anomalously large player base at Endwalker's launch show a dramatic decline.

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Funny, because that graph shows that there are fewer people in 6.1 than in early 2021 before the WoW influx.

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Originally Posted by hunkygladiator

The WoW influx is a complete fluke. The population is going to start declining as the WoW players slowly get bored and move on.

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What do you base this on?
Nothing.

And ofc you're going to get people who try the game and don't like it and leave.
You're trying very hard to be negative for no real reason.

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Originally Posted by hunkygladiator

All white knights can do is describe real facts and statistics as "doomsaying".

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This is like people going on about '' virtue-signaling '' but then they sit around circlejerking and virtue-signaling to each other about how bad the game is lol.
Labelling and calling people names for disagreeing with you doesn't make you right.

Why does it make people a '' white knight '' for using common sense and not shitting on the game for no reason, but it's not okay to call you a doomsayer?

Tbh I don't even know a single person who plays through Steam, I even forget the game is even on Steam altogether.

Edit: Also the game has increased in players with every expansion long before the '' WoW refugees ''.
Yes if a lot of people leave a game there's going to be a certain influx of new players in other games and not all of them are going to stick around.

But this is like some crap like people saying '' Asmongold made FFXIV popular '' or whatever which just completely ignores all of the time before he so much as thought about playing the game.

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Originally Posted by NekoMataMata

So many trolls. Last I checked the game was healthy enough that I'm still getting at least a tiny queue whenever I log in(although no where nearly as big as back when EW released).

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I run into a queue every day too, and the game is supposedly more popular in the US than in the EU I think.
So I am assuming they get longer queues.
If the game servers are perpetually full then I dunno how this equates to '' game is dying '' according to some people.

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Originally Posted by hunkygladiator

https://i.ibb.co/MPBmpDh/Untitled.png

People have been saying make healers more engaging since Shadowbringers, and it’s been ignored.

People have been saying endgame is horrible with lack of content and it’s been ignored.

People want better hairstyles and headgears on the new races and it's been ignored.

After an ENTIRE year of receiving player feedback and FAILING to do what the community wants, now we have them scrambling to fix critical bugs after bugs like the housing lottery bug.

What a joke.

I wanted FF14 to thrive, I loved Stormblood but the game is dying and on it’s way out.

Square Enix, changes need to be made FAST.

NOT in 7.0, NOT in 8.0, it needs to happen THIS EXPANSION or you WILL lose the remaining player base.

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I cancelled over $600 in pre-orders last week. Subscription is done in September. If SquareEnix doesn't want my money, someone else will.

I also don't like the direction the game is going in but saying it's bleeding players or such nonsense is pushing it.
I play on PC (not through Steam) and PS5 by the way.

You can claim troll all you want but you can't deny there's certain trends. Anecdotally, most of my friends or fc are hardly online these days. I experienced worse queues when getting in for 5.1 than 6.1. Even if there are more people playing now than in 5.1, the fact of the matter is that the drop from 6.0 release has been stark. More players, but a smaller percent are truly engaged, so the numbers look much similar to where they were before the influx. Steam numbers are a microcosm of this.

The population always increases at an expansion release. Most of it has never stuck once they complete the story. Usually the amount of active players permanently grows by 200,000 after an expansion dies down, but it seems to have been a lot more this time.

MUST NEED STEAM VALIDATION... sounds like an asmongold chat