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

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I mean, the OP and many others support this claim. I just went along.

If a game actually lost 70% of players like doomsayers claim, the game is factually dead. Not dying, Dead.

So my advice to them is stop paying sub. This is a genuine advice. Don't pay your hard earned money on a dead game. Don't spend time and energy on a dead game. You can't revive the dead.

Yeah but OP is an rmt bot troll, so can't really take them seriously.

[SaltyDaddy]

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.

Nobody ever sayid we have lower player numbers than in a ARR. Its very weird to say "Hey, its not so bad. We still have more players than 2014", when ARR was still kinda bad.

We cant even compare to launch of EW, because as seen in the trend, many people come play the new expansion and then wait for next one. But we can compare player retention

What we need to compare with, is Shadowbringers, not ARR. And what we are going to find, is that current number are basically same with Shadowbringers patches, except end of ShB, because of WOW refugees and people coming back for pre-EW release. That means, we are growing, but not much. ShB kept 50% players of expansion release still playing. EW just 33%. Sadest thing is, because of content drought during coronavirus, numbers in FF werent so high back then as it could have been, even tho it rised to double back then. But that could also be because of quality of ShB.

TLDR: Endwalker, ofc, have biggest number of active players. But player retention is lower than in previous expansions.

[DPZ2]

TLDR: Endwalker, ofc, have biggest number of active players. But player retention is lower than in previous expansions.

The SteamChart statistics say nothing about player retention. No statistic you can find on the page for FFXIV says anything other than "X number players are online at any given time". Motivation, the total number of active subscriptions, play style. The statistics cannot be used to infer anything about those topics. Personal anecdotes might give you a little bit of information, but you'd have to do an extensive survey, asking actual questions of current and former players across all platforms, to validate those anecdotes on a wide scale.

I only used the 9 year span because the graphing does not cover a two year period. So, here are some things I've already discussed as far as the "timeline" argument you have brought up.

As an example: net sales for the 2023/Q3 Square Enix "Digital Entertainment/MMO division" increased 11 billion yen from net sales in 2021/Q3. They also were down 8 billion yen from net sales in 2022/Q3. Conjecture: the game is "thriving" because it made more money that it did 2 years ago. (It is asserted that the difference between 2022 and 2023 net sales would be income from the initial sale of the Endwalker expansion.)

Another example: The SteamChart for FFXIV indicates the average players in March 2021 as 17,149.9 (gotta love averaging that reduces a player to .9). March 2022 as 17,937.2. March 2023 as 21,718.3. Conjecture: the game is "thriving" because year over year daily averages for Steam players rose by about 4000 over that time period.

The number for March of 2020 (well into Shadowbringers) are about 7,000 lower than 2023.

The only real thing one can draw from those statistics is that more players are using Steam as their FFXIV subscription base now. We can't even suggest that it's the same 21,718.3 players for each and every one of the 720 data points gathered each month.

TLDR: Statistics do not indicate the reason for any change in the number of Steam players active during any given hour. To believe otherwise is a misreading of the statistics one can garner from SteamCharts.

[DiaDeem]

As I said earlier, this doesn't discount the data provided by steam. CBU3 would be stupid to just ignore it.

I mean... let's say you have 1000 people. Of those 1000, 300 are Steam users. Even if 100% of those users go away, you still have 700 people left. It's not about discounting the data from Steam, it's about how poor of a job it's been done at using it to present what comes across as a very poor complaint.

First of all, the post is misleading. With that title, the argument is presented as if Steam was 100% of the player base, when it is just a minority. We didn't lose 70% of our players, and you know this is true, but that's how the original post was made. It's an intentional lie. You're now moving the goal posts to "Oh but let's still count them" and sure, we can do that, but that comes across as dishonest, and makes it hard to take any conversation seriously.

Second, this is an alarmist post, and those should never be taken seriously. It's not attempting to discuss demographics, or attempting to focus down on a "main issue" with the game. Post is not even interested in researching the numbers for Windows and PlayStation users that have come and gone. It presents a single graph, screaming bloody murder and imply the game is doomed because "unengaging healers", "no endgame content" and "no hairstyles". Post doesn't even make an attempt to go around to collect and quote some of the better posts floating around the internet about each one of these issues, or many others that are just randomly ignored. Instead the claim is that there's "critical bugs"? Yeah, the lottery bug was pretty nasty, but everyone affected by it either got their money back or got their house, and that was months ago.

In short: Yeah, we could have the Steam charts in some kind of conversation, because it's not like there isn't one to be had, but the way the graph is presented misleading, the post is lazy at best and an alarmist mess at worse, and this is why so many people in here are having a hard time taking the thread seriously.

[Deslanthe]

Steam is but a fraction of the player base, and I would take steam data with a grain of salt. Because Steam doesnt show my data, Because I dont use Steam to play FF14 therefore my account wouldnt show up, now would hundreds of thousands of other accounts. To further add, I often have a login wait so if the game is dead why is my server full all the time?

[Stormpeaks]

Steam is but a fraction of the player base, and I would take steam data with a grain of salt. Because Steam doesnt show my data, Because I dont use Steam to play FF14 therefore my account wouldnt show up, now would hundreds of thousands of other accounts. To further add, I often have a login wait so if the game is dead why is my server full all the time?

Tell us you didnt read the thread without telling us you didnt read the thread, everything you said has already been answered multiple time, be it for the steam data or for the login queue

[Colt47]

The thing is that it's not just the player drop off at play that is making some places feel like a ghost town. The data center travel encourages people to gather at some common point (in this case the place I see the most activity is aether). That and the longer an mmo is out the more pronounced the drop offs are when we hit a slump.

People are definitely right with content issues though. It feels more like there is content there, but no one knows how to access it or it can only be accessed by going back to older zones. I personally do not even know where the other special dungeon is that was the follow up to Nanomos dungeon and that was released I think in patch 6.3? I don't even know anymore. They need more ways to point content out if someone isn't paying attention to patch notes.

[Ranaku]

I love all the doom and gloom in here. And yet still i will do my roulette later and have no trouble finding any group, will have fun with my well populated active FC, will see tons of people everywhere and am hyped for the next patch which will bring back many players.

The game has more than a million active players and no matter how much doom and gloom the forum trolls want to spread, the game will probably outlive me...

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

I love all the doom and gloom in here. And yet still i will do my roulette later and have no trouble finding any group,

Who cares about your in-game experience
LOOK AT THE STEAMCHARTS

[Stormpeaks]

Who cares about your in-game experience
LOOK AT THE STEAMCHARTS

What a stupid take lmao, you can say that on a game with 4 people in it too, "oh wow I have my 4 friends with me the game is totally not losing subscribers and it's totally extra healthy"

Your point of view doesnt make a game more healthy or unhealthy, nor does your in game experience