Quote Originally Posted by Stormpeaks View Post
That's actually a great move, that way we cant judge a game at all by its popularity since you can just deny any sort of metrics, saying that "it's not the entire population" or "only them have the real numbers", knowing VERY WELL that they will never release those numbers because it wouldnt look good for them, once again, you use that to your convenience so it fits your narrative, that's not how a sample works, and the steamcharts metric is a good example of that, people keep denying it, while it is in fact a good metric and gives a downward trend since about 3 months.
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.