FF14 player count reached the lowest point in 4 years. We lost 75% of the playerbase.

[DPZ2]

And once again, you have yet to provide any logical reason why Steam players are different enough as a cohort to render them statistically irrelevant.

All one can gather from the Steam Charts is that fewer people are actively playing at the same time. How do you equate that with "losing 75% of the playerbase"?

And what is meant by the term "losing"? Because last time I checked, Steam does not report subscription numbers for online games. Those numbers are more important to Square Enix's bottom line. I don't count 17.3 billion yen in profits as "losing".

[BigCheez]

All one can gather from the Steam Charts is that fewer people are actively playing at the same time. How do you equate that with "losing 75% of the playerbase"?

And what is meant by the term "losing"? Because last time I checked, Steam does not report subscription numbers for online games. Those numbers are more important to Square Enix's bottom line. I don't count 17.3 billion yen in profits as "losing".

Occam's razor.

Steam's average player numbers dropping significantly without the total number of players being affected would require a very strange set of circumstances in which everyone had continued to play the game, but less regularly, and were also somehow managing to coordinate when they play the game to avoid being online at the same time. Logically, you would expect there to be times like the evenings and weekends where people's play time would naturally overlap, resulting in more concurrent players.

When you combine this with the data from the Lucky Bancho report, reduced number of logs on FFLogs, reduced engagement in online communities, YouTube and Twitch, reduced PF activity in game, longer queue times and anecdotal evidence that literally everyone I know has stopped playing the game (there are 76 players in my FC, 50% have been offline for more than 2 months. 60% have been offline for more than 2 weeks. 90% have been offline for more than a week), it's pretty obvious that a majority of the playerbase is not actively playing at the minute.

Trying to suggest otherwise would be a fairly impressive level of cope.

[DPZ2]

Occam's razor.

Through Occam's Razor, increased sales over 3 quarters from a previous year should indicate the company is making more money this year than last. Since money earned through subscriptions is a good chunk of those profits, a significant downturn in the playerbase should result in a decided drop in those profits.

Your 'average players' still says nothing about the actual number of subscribers.

There are problems with the Lucky Bancho report. The biggest is that it drops players leveling from 1 through 70 because it cannot discern between free to play and paying subscribers. The second biggest is that it does not report on subscriptions, because those numbers are not present. The third biggest is that it inflates the number of active players based on the number of characters in the game, not the number of accounts paying a subscription. Go ask the alt-aholic contingent whether they have more than 1 character on their account.

The only report I've read recently indicates a drop from 1.4 million characters to about 1.03 million characters in the latest report, decidedly not anywhere near the click-bait of 75%.

If the argument is that Steam Chart numbers drop off between patches, or that that 95k concurrent player mark will never be reached again (that occurred one month before Endwalker released, mind you), or that the release of other games is as likely to attract a Steam player as this one, you've got my acknowledgement.

The use of terms like 'crater' and 'catastrophic' do not yet apply.

[BigCheez]

Through Occam's Razor, increased sales over 3 quarters from a previous year should indicate the company is making more money this year than last. Since money earned through subscriptions is a good chunk of those profits, a significant downturn in the playerbase should result in a decided drop in those profits.

Your 'average players' still says nothing about the actual number of subscribers.

There are problems with the Lucky Bancho report. The biggest is that it drops players leveling from 1 through 70 because it cannot discern between free to play and paying subscribers. The second biggest is that it does not report on subscriptions, because those numbers are not present. The third biggest is that it inflates the number of active players based on the number of characters in the game, not the number of accounts paying a subscription. Go ask the alt-aholic contingent whether they have more than 1 character on their account.

The only report I've read recently indicates a drop from 1.4 million characters to about 1.03 million characters in the latest report, decidedly not anywhere near the click-bait of 75%.

If the argument is that Steam Chart numbers drop off between patches, or that that 95k concurrent player mark will never be reached again (that occurred one month before Endwalker released, mind you), or that the release of other games is as likely to attract a Steam player as this one, you've got my acknowledgement.

The use of terms like 'crater' and 'catastrophic' do not yet apply.

I don't care how much money SE are making. I care about the quality of the game and service that I'm receiving for my money. I'm also not here to make bold claims about 75% of the playerbase having jumped ship. You can take that up with the OP.

While you're right in that the Lucky Bancho report is not a complete dataset because it doesn't include non-max level players, we don't need a complete dataset. We need a large enough sample size to accurately gauge player behaviour. A sample size of 1.4 million characters is definitely a large enough sample size to do that. We could reasonably assume that retention has been better for players who are still playing through the MSQ because they haven't arrived at Dawntrail and aren't dealing with the current issues, but the discourse here is primarily about the current state of endgame and how that has affected the active (and now inactive) playerbase.

What we can see is that the drop from 1.4m active characters to 1 million (and probably lower now because the report was a month or so ago) is a much larger percentage change than we're used to seeing at this point in an expansion, and that definitely tells us that something is wrong and should probably change in future expansions.

I think the word "catastrophic" is definitely a fitting descriptor for the reception to Dawntrail's launch period. It's been littered with issues so far. Here's hoping that things improve.

[Kohashi]

Snip.

I doubt many would see a reason to your arguments because most here are too busy repeating themselves into oblivion over what is a grossly inaccurate flawed representation of a number.

While numbers are indeed low I would say they follow pretty much the trend of every patch cycle with the outlier being the time when we had Covid and people had nothing else to do so naturally the numbers were much higher. If you do look at the chart you see the same dips in numbers every single time for every single damn expansion.

Also patch 7.1 hardly had any content. Is the game in trouble? We shall see with the 7.2 more accurately when long-term content gets dropped.

[Red-thunder]

We shall see with the 7.2 more accurately when long-term content gets dropped.

Honestly it's not unlikely everyone will just start yelling "FF14 is saved!!!" as they accept generic, stale FATE bumrushing for the millionth time. This game's playerbase has no standards. I'd be pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. I care about this game's playerbase - people around me have so much more fun when they finally quit FF14 and play better games. But honestly the playerbase is so starved you can probably throw out an overcooked steak (7.25) and they'll lap it up.

BTW feast and famine induces addiction.

[Kohashi]

Honestly it's not unlikely everyone will just start yelling "FF14 is saved!!!" as they accept generic, stale FATE bumrushing for the millionth time. This game's playerbase has no standards. I'd be pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. I care about this game's playerbase - people around me have so much more fun when they finally quit FF14 and play better games. But honestly the playerbase is so starved you can probably throw out an overcooked steak (7.25) and they'll lap it up.

BTW feast and famine induces addiction.

Getting upset over a path release cycle that always existed since the game was released is really weird to me.

And for the record, I also wish they completely rework the path cycle release even if it means they need to increase the sub price, but looking back, I would say it's safe to say SE will not do anything of that kind unless a major shift/ event is happening.

Like I was telling my friend, it will take 1 good MMO to come and ff14 will be a ghost town because of how outdated, unoptimized junk the entire game and core code is.

Probably the modded community will continue to exist and will be pretty much the only one keeping it on the map.

[Hallarem]

Getting upset over a path release cycle that always existed since the game was released is really weird to me.

And for the record, I also wish they completely rework the path cycle release even if it means they need to increase the sub price, but looking back, I would say it's safe to say SE will not do anything of that kind unless a major shift/ event is happening.

Like I was telling my friend, it will take 1 good MMO to come and ff14 will be a ghost town because of how outdated, unoptimized junk the entire game and core code is.

Probably the modded community will continue to exist and will be pretty much the only one keeping it on the map.

Nonsense. Even if Riot came out with foxgirls, catgirls, better systems, a better world and story with a whole boatload of money and resources to back it up on the hot rails of Arcane. Nobody would quit the obviously superior FFXIV. We love our cycles and lack of change and communication, it's a cute little surprise box that way! And everyone loves presents!. You can trust in the product to never fail that way. I wish they would upgrade our sub price, maybe even double it if it meant we could get some well deserved superior remakes of old Final Fantasies so we could visit the worlds. I think FFX-2 Yuna should make a cameo with two laserpistols in space when we get there. That would be so cool, we could be the spacewings instead of gullwings and Rikku can come and drive a giant mecha.