Originally Posted by
Ayche
No normal customer has any sane reason to actually care a lick about how popular a game is. At an extreme end where you literally can no longer play a multiplayer game cos the pop is so low as the only exception (don't even waste breath bringing up FFXIV running out of player for patch days), one might only really obsess over game popularity as a proxy for weird tribal wars where you can "prove" how bad x is or how good y is in comparison. And so it is not left unsaid, that loser behavior. Obsessing over game's popularity as a customer is loser behavior. Don't bother replying more proofs about reading public data sets how tailend of patches have less players than expansion highs, I am interested.
Developers have the genuine reason to care, their wage relies on it. If FFXIV goes away in the future, I might be sad over it, not fatal. For the devs that means layoffs, a bit more consequential. If you wanna go check your internet message board scoreboard for wins, go do that.