JP: Yoshi P should step down, FF14 is a sinking ship, in response to interview

[Sensui]

July 2024 vs same time last year:

July 2024
Avg players: 42,181.1
Peak players: 77,305

July 2023
Avg players: 22,851.4
Peak players: 37,518

Also. EW released during the pandemic. More people were home playing games and using it as a form of social interaction. So using that as a baseline is somewhat flawed. The delta from peak EW and DT was only ~4k considering. I dunno, doesn't scream sinking all things considered.

[Fawkes]

Objectively untrue. Using Steam Charts (since it's the only really reliable source for this), the peak player count for Dawntrail was actually *lower* then it was for Endwalker, indicating a (small) drop-off. For the future, we'll just have to see.

Yoshi-P said Dawntrail set a new record for concurrent players.

[Kiyumi]

I am pretty mixed on DT and agree with much of the criticism, but the battle content is arguably better than ever and EW/SHB were very solid. Calling it a sinking ship is beyond over-dramatic. One 'mixed' expansion and now we're sinking, really?


Also, Yoshi P is a person with his own views. If you think he's the problem with FF14, God help you. I think just about every other community wishes they had someone like Yoshi at the lead instead of some soulless executive. He's not perfect, but he does his best and cares about both, us and the game. So maybe not immediately go for his throat when an expansion is a bit disappointing.

[SongOfTheWind]

Yoshi-P said Dawntrail set a new record for concurrent players.

Based on the numbers only they can see and no one can check.

[Shurrikhan]

Objectively untrue. Using Steam Charts (since it's the only really reliable source for this), the peak player count for Dawntrail was actually *lower* then it was for Endwalker, indicating a (small) drop-off. For the future, we'll just have to see.

July 2024 vs same time last year:

July 2024
Avg players: 42,181.1
Peak players: 77,305

July 2023
Avg players: 22,851.4
Peak players: 37,518

Also. EW released during the pandemic. More people were home playing games and using it as a form of social interaction.

...Endwalker released in December 2021. By that time, stringency of containment policy was mild in Japan, US, and the EU. Of countries speaking the games' 4 primary/official languages, only Australia and Switzerland were still in moderate or greater stringency. Outgoing travel bans had been lifted internationally and incoming travel bans were few and far between.

It was also 1.5 years before the numbers you're providing here for comparison to Dawntrail... If comparing Endwalker's launch number against DT's, which was for most countries effectively post-lockdown, would rely on a "flawed baseline", what is the point of these two figures? Why compare an expansion's release figures to an expansion's lull?

[Wolf_Necros]

You do realize that a good captain goes down with the ship right?

[Sensui]

Yeah. I said Peak DT vs Peak EW were ~4k apart. Not sure why you're confused. The other dates were looking at now to a year ago. If you go back to 2014, it was 7k vs. 28k today. Clearly dying.

June 2024 peak: 91,883
December 2021 preak: 95,102

[Sensui]

Its literally in the text you initially quoted..

Nevermind... its not worth it. Just keep on hating on a game you pay for. If you think it's failing and you don't like the direction it's going, go do something else.. or just keep complaining about it and keep forking over your money.

[SDaemon]

Is the YoshiP Primal Tempering finally wearing off? Never thought I’d see the day.

Players have been critical of Yoshi P since ARR. Every time there is something the community views negatively they come together and criticize him. Time passes, they either forget their woes or get drowned out amongst other, newer issues that come up and time keeps moving forward. Genuinely don't see this being any different.

[All_Nonsense]

It's hard to quantify a success metric for a live service game. Players usually determine it based on their opinion of the current state of the game, and the developers base it on more empirical figures such as active subscription count and revenue stream. Obviously this is a pretty big simplification of how the parties involved think, but it does outline the natural disparity that occurs organically in a developer-player relationship. So what we then tend to look at is how the developer bridges that gap (as we should rightfully expect them to do).

Yoshi P and the lead members of the development team did a wonderful job of this over the course of about a decade. It was a delight. I have noticed a strange behavior from the dev team since about this time last year that's been concerning however, and it's that they don't seem as engaged with us as they used to. It's like they've pulled back from the player base for some reason. Everyone isn't going to stick their proverbial finger in the air to determine the wind direction here, but subconsciously I feel like folks became attuned to this mild division at some point and this in turn has magnified their reactions to YoshiP's completely tone-deaf and out of touch response as a result. It has scared people who don't want to lose one of the last vestiges of a game dev having a good relationship with its playerbase. A lot of us were there for WoW and Destiny 2's transformation into "the villain," (it's complicated and I don't feel like picking different words ) and they're scared that it's going to happen here now. That's why everyone is blowing up rn.

I do think that YoshiP stepping down would be the worst possible thing for this game tho. The folks who think that's a good thing have no idea how much of a death knell that would truly be, or how fortunate we are to have YoshiP at the helm of this game.