LuckyBancho data shows that FF14 is in decline

[Supersnow845]

You CANT onboard them while retaining your current core when the game operates differently fundamentally. When the playerbases are looking for entirely different things. Why waste time trying and risking your core when you already know what they look for in a game? They don't have to change shizz for WoW folks. I guarantee you WoW ain't changing a damn thing if XIV players went over there.

Also you talk as if CBU3 is this massive team on xiv. News Flash it's not, and is why or patch cycle is the length it is rn. They have a whole 7.0 to focus on. I'd rather they make sure that is good than stretch themselves out for a CHANCE to appease the WoW crowd.

The games aren’t that different, I swear people who think WOW chains you to the game haven’t played since MOP, if 14 tried they 100% could hold onto some of the WOW players, it’s not like the refugees are a monolith, regardless 14 didn’t even try and now EW may end up finishing lower than ShB started which is not a good result

If the team on 14 isn’t massive it should be considering that 14 is squares cash cow, extending the patch cycle achieved nothing other than plummeting player retention and they still made less content, 7.0 isn’t an excuse, tje game simply doesn’t release enough content

[Sebazy]

I would expect the same from a FFXIV refugee over in WoW as well. One is a main game, the other is a side game.

FFXIV used to do absolutely fine in this regard though.

You used to have a healthy and strong community of raiders that would be often be clearing weekly without fail regardless of if we were just post or pre content drops. Go back to 2.x to 3.1ish and you'd regularly see groups queueing outside Wineport/Alex all year round. It's harder to gauge now with remote queueing for Savage but at least from my circle's experience we continued to raid solidly through the rest of HW and SB.

What's changed? The raid community never used to be a ghost town 2 months from a content drop like the way it is now.

To me it feels like SE have been throwing darts at a wall with side content and trimmings to see what sticks for years now which personally I don't have a problem with at all, but in the process they've let the fundamental core game underneath go rotten and stale.

You CANT onboard them while retaining your current core when the game operates differently fundamentally. When the playerbases are looking for entirely different things.

The same point stands here as well really. I'd say it's as much the end game raid scene that's died as it is WoW refugees leaving. This game catered just fine to them for years, but seemingly it doesn't cut it anymore.

[IkaraGreydancer]

The games aren’t that different, I swear people who think WOW chains you to the game haven’t played since MOP, if 14 tried they 100% could hold onto some of the WOW players, it’s not like the refugees are a monolith, regardless 14 didn’t even try and now EW may end up finishing lower than ShB started which is not a good result

If the team on 14 isn’t massive it should be considering that 14 is squares cash cow, extending the patch cycle achieved nothing other than plummeting player retention and they still made less content, 7.0 isn’t an excuse, tje game simply doesn’t release enough content

Well you're conflating my point. My point isn't about how much they release. It's about how they're stretched thin due to SE and so doing extra hoping to appeal to a seperate fanbase isn't a priority. 7.0 is. You say it's not an excuse but it IS the reality. It sucks sure but SE is to blame for the majority of that, not CBU3.

[Jojoya]

Yes but if 14 wasn’t so allergic to releasing content they could have captured even 20% of that market

Let’s say they kicked it into high gear and vomited out and extra zone for Bozja in 7.0 and maybe a second deep dungeon, not much work in the grand scheme of things but something that might have encouraged even 20% of the WOW refugees to stay with zero negative effects on the current playerbase

If you are in an industry and a competitor dumps their customers into your lap you don’t ignore them because they have slightly different tastes, you attempt to permanently onboard them without affecting your core market, 14 didn’t even try, it basically just sat there and said “we are changing nothing if you aren’t interested you can go away”

How would you have onboarded more WoW players without affecting the core?

More Bozja would not have been the way to go. WoW has no Bozja-like content and the only WoW players that would have gotten far enough to experience it would have already committed to playing FFXIV on a regular basis. 5.0 MSQ plus completion of Ivalice is a fairly big barrier unless they were buying job boosts and story skips.

WoW players were fed a diet primarily of PvP, M+, which does not have an equivalent in FFXIV, and raiding. We are seeing many WoW players enjoying the raiding since they're finally free of Weak Auras. They're now playing both games for the raiding.

No serious PvPer would pick FFXIV over WoW PvP, though it's possible that FFXIV PvP might have won over some of the casual PvPers (that I genuinely have no idea about since I don't PvP so I rarely talk to them).

FFXIV is still missing something that fills the M+ gap. If SE wanted to win over more of the WoW players, that's what they would need to focus on but it's going to take them time to develop it. Could something similar to M+ be the mysterious new Battle Content for Dawntrail?

FFXIV also won over many of the casual WoW players that realized they hated WoW's rush to endgame to start gear grinding design. They've enjoyed the story-based approach to leveling.

I wouldn't be surprised if FFXIV did latch onto 20% of those who came from WoW during the exodus. If FFXIV numbers have dropped enough that the active player base is not at least 20% higher than pre-Exodus, there is loss somewhere else.

The achievement graph is not the place to determine that since the data is collected from a subset of players that are self-selected. If any of LB's data is going to be accepted as representative, the place to check would be LB's actual census.

Active characters over free trial level cap:

April 2021 - 951,307 (pre-exodus)
Nov 2021 - 1,624,238 (post-exodus, pre-EW)
Jan 2022 - 1,347,764 (first census after EW release)
July 2023 - 1,137,275 (most recent - 19.5% increase over pre-exodus)

More numbers that might be helpful to identify "intensity" of player engagement in EW compared to the same point in Shadowbringers:

(Feb 2021) active Level 80 characters after release of 5.4: 692,683 out of 906,740 total active characters (76%)
(July 2023) active Level 90 characters after release of 6.4: 894,467 out of 1,137,275 total active characters (78%)

I'm not going to comment on the numbers - feel free to create your own interpretations based off things like alts, people subscribed only to retain their house, etc. Also feel free to make your own copy of LB's census to gather numbers from other census dates and data types.

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

It's odd how people like TC seem to be obsessed with wanting FF14 to fail.

[CNitsah]

It's odd how people like TC seem to be obsessed with wanting FF14 to fail.

I would argue that people complain because they don't want it to fail.

[Lauront]

Yes but if 14 wasn’t so allergic to releasing content they could have captured even 20% of that market

Let’s say they kicked it into high gear and vomited out and extra zone for Bozja in 7.0 and maybe a second deep dungeon, not much work in the grand scheme of things but something that might have encouraged even 20% of the WOW refugees to stay with zero negative effects on the current playerbase

If you are in an industry and a competitor dumps their customers into your lap you don’t ignore them because they have slightly different tastes, you attempt to permanently onboard them without affecting your core market, 14 didn’t even try, it basically just sat there and said “we are changing nothing if you aren’t interested you can go away”

They also were clearly hoping to retain some of this increase, or else they wouldn't be looking to upgrade their server capacity. There were comments about this earlier on by LB (section on the Steam figures) on whether they could justify that expansion.

Frankly there would be little point in such an upgrade if they did not envisage retaining a good portion of these players, and at least enough to put the game above at or above SHB levels of subs (the peak for SHB incidentally prior to the exodus was in the order of 1,25m.) Otherwise, if the expectation was they'd never be able to retain them, and thus need do nothing to that end, it'd be a case of just ride it out. Maybe just expand capacity temporarily to accommodate, if possible. The game experienced a high influx of newer players since the WoW exodus, many of whom would have had more content to work through. I suspect the messaging that they were getting from their subscription data was that their plan, at the time, was working, as you had plenty of new players who had backlogs of content to keep them busy. However, survey after survey has shown a decline in the rate of new players coming into the game. Once the honeymoon period wears off and you're max level, working through the older content isn't really going to provide much of a challenge, for the most part, and there isn't that much to do with the newer content. I simply don't think DT will be able to deliver the same story hook as earlier expansions did. And all the while Dragonflight is delivering a pretty busy schedule of content since its release, catering to a variety of tastes in terms of how much time they want to spend on the game. I don't think it's really right to look at this with such a deterministic lens that they could do nothing whatsoever to retain the new players who came to the game, when even reverting to some of their earlier expansions' content models could've maybe salvaged the situation. The V/C dungeons, which they had mentioned vaguely when interviewed by Asmongold, did seem like a step towards that... just not a very well executed one.

Seems like they maybe misjudged what would interest this new audience as well as some of their existing players and that they thought they could alter the content model they were delivering (such that it has lower effective durability) whilst working on 16 in parallel - work which will continue thanks to the announced DLCs.

I was already somewhat underwhelmed when they revealed the basis of their go-forward 10 year plan. Nothing they've said about 7.0 suggests much different to me, or much that will help attract back a new playerbase they've already waved goodbye to, and I don't believe Yoshi has a good understanding of what 'younger' players want, either, or that he has a realistic appraisal of their game's ability to cater to that perception of them. It matters little to me as a player whether this is CBU3 or higher up in SE which is to blame. I imagine likewise it will matter little to their shareholders. The end result won't change. And it's not like Yoshi didn't want to work on XVI...

All of which is not to say the game will crater financially, especially if it hovers at or around the level of subs it had during SB or SHB. This is solely to do with failure to capitalise on the WoW exodus. It's one of the cashcows they want to use to fund their other projects, so it does feel like there was a missed opportunity to build on that. Maybe the goal now is just to try maximise mogstation spend from the customers they've been able to hold onto.

[Jojoya]

All of which is not to say the game will crater financially, especially if it hovers at or around the level of subs it had during SB. This is solely to do with failure to capitalise on the WoW exodus. It's one of the cashcows they want to use to fund their other projects, so it does feel like there was a missed opportunity to build on that. Maybe the goal now is just to try maximise mogstation spend from the customers they've been able to hold onto.

Did they state somewhere that they were going to use the exodus as a cash cow or is that your personal assumption?

I know some point to the new worlds as evidence but the planning for server expansion had existed pre-COVID (probably in anticipation of finalizing the Xbox deal) then got screwed up by the microchip shortage that lasted through COVID. It wasn't something that they dreamed up only after the WoW exodus. The exodus plus the Endwalker crush combined likely pushed them into moving sooner with it.

[Lauront]

Did they state somewhere that they were going to use the exodus as a cash cow or is that your personal assumption?

Nope, but it was also not what I was referring to. I'm referring to XIV itself given that it's a stable source of revenue for them. It stands to reason the exodus could be used to grow that.

I know some point to the new worlds as evidence but the planning for server expansion had existed pre-COVID (probably in anticipation of finalizing the Xbox deal) then got screwed up by the microchip shortage that lasted through COVID. It wasn't something that they dreamed up only after the WoW exodus. The exodus plus the Endwalker crush combined likely pushed them into moving sooner with it.

But that would certainly affect expectations regarding the scale required and changing circumstances affect whether you'd proceed with it or not even if it was drawn up beforehand. Proceeding with it says to me they expected growth and retention. Anyway, what I am saying is that there's no point in pressing forward with that if you expect the increase to be a blip and then for the population to fall back in numbers, i.e. if you think you have no hope of retaining those new players and that the population will recede following EW. If they really went into it thinking there was no hope of retaining these players, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I see little to suggest that was how they approached it and that they went into it thinking "well, we'll never be able to retain them anyway so why bother?" so much as they misjudged what it'd take. And while their hands may be tied to an extent by the work currently going on, that's not the reason given for the content design decisions in EW, so much as perception of player demand, e.g. here and here.

[Turtledeluxe]

Games don't need to financially fail to suck. The game's defense force jumps to that in the same way that devs jump to "well players are turning in tomes for relics so they must like it". I barely play the game anymore but I pay my sub because a. I want the game to get better and b. I have a house plot I worked really hard to get.

I'd also point out there are lots of ways for the game to generate more revenue without necessarily capturing new players. Implying all revenue is driven by new player subscriptions is inaccurate, even if you spread it across three games.