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

[DPZ2]

You can see in this thread, that many people dont understand the word "statistic" and think that for sure, for sure other client users are different.

I've pretty much ignored that argument in my own recent posts. Here's another chart from the FFXIV SteamCharts. Let's use this to discuss drops in the player base, shall we?



The Steam player base was relatively flat from 2014 through 2019. Note the 'peak players' point in mid-2018, 10,272. Move directly to the right to the end of the last dip. That number is currently 33,821. Conclusion? The game now attracts 3 times as many active players as it did 5 years ago.

It's an inaccurate conclusion though. Peak is fun to look at (that 95,102 peak in late 2021 is the release of Endwalker) but doesn't really tell us much about the actual number of players who play the game.

Average Players (the lower solid graph) is the number of Steam players who are playing the game, sampled at regular intervals every day, averaged for the month. I suspect that number is sampled every hour, leaving us with around 720 data points each month. Note that this number drops during non-prime time and rises during prime time.

The lower graph is the average player count over the years, February 2014 through current date. The value for left side of the chart is 3,577.8. The value for the right side of the chart is 20,391.4. Conclusion? The game now attracts 5.6 times as many players as it did 9 years ago. That is the definition of a game that is successful.

What is missing from this chart? An interpretation for the peaks and valleys. I can pretty much guarantee that the peak in 2017 was the release of Stormblood, the peak in 2019 was Shadowbringers release, the peaks in 2021 correspond to the Great Awakening and subsequent influx of WoW players looking for the Next Best Thing and the release of Endwalker.

Does all of this data tell us anything about subscriptions? Only that there are at least 5+ times as many players paying for a subscription via Steam than there were back in 2014.