Are we destroying "our own" game?

[Voidmage]

“Hello everyone, this is Naoki Yoshida, Producer and Director of FINAL FANTASY XIV,” started the developer. “I would like to thank you all for your patience and cooperation in dealing with server congestion during the early access for Dawntrail. With your support, we were able to reach a record number of concurrent users we’ve not seen since the release of A Realm Reborn in 2013.”

But beyond the official statement from Square Enix, the only reliable numbers we can go off is Steam Data, least of all unless you have a metric that is something we can base performance off? I guess we could wait for 2025 Financial performance to compare the operational revenue, but for right now that is the only metric we have that is open to the public so I will cite it as such.

Endwalker
January 2022 65,565
December 2021 95,102

Dawntrail
June 2024 91,883
July 2024 91,883

To be fair. The great DT numbers could also mean that EW gave some kind of hype push.
If I had to interpret them I would say:

EW had a good start and got additional players a month later.
DT has round about the same initial players as EW had at its "peak" (is it the peak?).
To me it seems mroe people preordered for DT, roughly the amount of EW players.
The "stagnating number" also doesn't have to do with unhappy players neccesarily but could also just mean that most players did early access. The servers were really stable this time.

You sure thats not an error? The numbers are the same for both month for DT.

I'm not denying DT's intial great success mind you. I just find it interesting.