FFXIV population decline continues

[Skaadenfroid]

Probably not an issue. There's little to no appeal at the moment for casual gamers with the content actually expecting people to put in effort to complete it, no exploration zone for grindcore content, and little to no 4 player party or solo content.

All of that is consistent with x.1 though and you see the same drop off in player count in previous expacs, it's just happened sooner in DT than in previous expansions which SHOULD be expected given SE has verbalized they don't feel the need to baby casual players this expansion (along with most of the midcore/hardcore players having cleared the raid tier enough to not want to keep griding it).

Stormblood was fine and that was BEFORE data center and world travel; the playerbase could drain pretty significantly and the game would be just as playable at all tiers.

Also (in america at least) there are a lot of direct economic contributors, which you see in ShB as well until about the time the Blizzard controversies start spinning up and content creators jump ship. If the best story this game could offer can suffer from the same issues and still be wildly successful then probably DT is doing fine.