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

[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.