Congratulations Square Enix! FF4 surpasses WoW this year. (Source inside)

[Kes13a]

who cares?

as long as SE makes enough money to keep the lights on I am happy. I switched my preferences from WoW a long time ago, and dont wish them ill fortune, but they made their course, and where it leads them is up to them and their loyal fans. FF has loyal fans and here we are.

I dont need big numbers to justify playing a game. I enjoy it, thats all that matters.

[Puremallace]

What a joke it'll never surpass WoW

Then go play WoW so I can get your house!!! Demo machine is coming for you!

This poor writer probably had no idea which kind of hell he unleashed on himself when he wrote this article...
Bless his heart...
Let's prey for him and wish him well...

Yeah it is pretty funny. I just hope it wakes up Activision to finally start cleaning house at Blizzard to hire people who know how to communicate with the playerbase. Ion HazExcuses has overseen the utter destruction of WoW as an RPG and standardized borrowed power.

[Sorimachi87]

Congratulations!!!
You guys earned it! Lets keep going and pushing forward! Wohooooooooo!

[Missbone]

Well thats a bit missleading if you count the active player numbers from WoW together since you can both games play with just one subscription WoW has still a total of 4 Million active players. Also i would guess that more than 95% are paying a subscription because the max is lvl 20 for free players and you cant do that much unlinke in FF14 there. Of course its good news that FF14 gets new players but WoW is still miles ahead when it comes to paying customers and total players.

[Shougun]

This poor writer probably had no idea which kind of hell he unleashed on himself when he wrote this article...
Bless his heart...
Let's prey for him and wish him well...

Haha, in my head I was hearing the blood mage quote about blood payment:

https://youtu.be/ro9n2YS1Yi4?t=59

[Y2K21]

It does depend if a player who actively plays both counts towards both totals. What surprises me most however is how large the Classic population is compared to Retail. Classic is a game that was created by a completely different development team to the current one. It's not a good outlook when your modern, polished game is struggling to keep up with a decade and a half old game made by the Devs you long since fired.

The issue with this line is that there is no separation between a Retail and a Classic subscription -- it is all one subscription. Basing it off outside math (in this case Reddit) -- doesnt necessarily mean anything when there is no way to validate if a subreddit follower is an active sub. What also constitutes to an active player under the math of MMO-Population?

It is why it is questionable when MMO-Population has two different metrics for player counting: Top MMO (which supposedly is how many active players) and MMO Growth (which is supposedly the growth of players over 30 days -- both spout two different numbers with MMO Growth being literally the subreddit number just being used to show population count.

These are the issues that website has when they choose to no longer publish how they get their estimations. Because at the moment, MMO-P shows that FF14 has 2.5 million players but on their Growth page which supposedly shows "Growth in players over a 30 day period" it drops to sub-500k. We can double check and see that the growth number is from the FF14 main subreddit.

So the main question remains: where is 2.5 million coming from? What is the math they do to achieve that number?

[MoonPhaseAlpha]

Congratulations Square Enix! FF4 surpasses WoW this year. (Source inside).

Cool, Final Fantasy 4 surpasses WoW this year!! I didn't realize an offline game could do that =P

(Yes, I know, it's a typo, but I couldn't help myself lol...)

[Dzian]

What surprises me most however is how large the Classic population is compared to Retail. Classic is a game that was created by a completely different development team to the current one. It's not a good outlook when your modern, polished game is struggling to keep up with a decade and a half old game made by the Devs you long since fired.

Nah its not that surprising at all really. In many ways It's not to different to how remasters of old games nearly always sell better than the newer ones even in the same franchise.

There's such a thing as to much accessibility, convenience, simplicity or QoL and it often has a hugely negative impact on games. Because it ultimately destroys the depth and complexities that makes them popular in the first place..

You dont even need to look outside of ffxiv to see it. Just look at the healer situation since 5.0 landed..or the general homogenization and how its ruined tanks to the point there all the same and even some of the dps classes. *COUGH* bard. Simple is boring.

Hell it's why so many of the players FFXIV does pull in don't stick around very long. because the game gets boring pretty fast if you dont have a decent network of friends because its so simple and shallow.

It's why so many big franchises die because they destroy all the features about a game that players like in this huge drive to be super simple and accessible to push sales. But then it flops because it ends up being a dull and shallow experience.

[Y2K21]

Well thats a bit missleading if you count the active player numbers from WoW together since you can both games play with just one subscription WoW has still a total of 4 Million active players. Also i would guess that more than 95% are paying a subscription because the max is lvl 20 for free players and you cant do that much unlinke in FF14 there. Of course its good news that FF14 gets new players but WoW is still miles ahead when it comes to paying customers and total players.

The misleading part about the website is that they list literal dead game without servers having active players unless the supposed 13k active Wildstar players managed to bootleg a server somehow.

Good site btw.

[Puremallace]

Cool, Final Fantasy 4 surpasses WoW this year!! I didn't realize an offline game could do that =P

(Yes, I know, it's a typo, but I couldn't help myself lol...)

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!