FF14 player count has fallen off a cliff and is now at 2019 levels (3/16/2025)

[Supersnow845]

Something got brought up to my attention:

From Dawntrail onwards, the absolute number of new characters is lower than in the Heavensward and Stormblood periods, when the overall number of characters achieved was lower.

It seems like their corporate strategy of constantly attracting new players, churning through players so that getting bored by the absolute dearth of content is not a concern since there's always fresh blood to replace the old... that seems to be finally coming to an end, in the sense that it no longer works.

They have taken the veterans for granted to chase the imaginary "young", "modern" gamer out there, but outside the WoW exodus that strategy hasn't succeeded. Especially when the MSQ is tediously long and is conveyed in an extremely outdated format.

Square always seems to focus on particular elements that in a vacuum seem to be “smart” but ignore massive conflicting elements that make the decision stupid

The “make everything easy for the hip new gamer with the attention span of an average tiktok addict” may not be a terrible strategy…….if you didn’t have to slog through 200 hours of MSQ. The whole “fix the lack of healers by making them easy so they aren’t scary” may not be terrible but……..MMO players will never not blame healers for everything even if it isn’t their fault

They never seem to look holistically at a problem they are trying to tackle

[User202503201232]

The “make everything easy for the hip new gamer with the attention span of an average tiktok addict” may not be a terrible strategy……

For real, I literally can't get anyone IRL to play this game. They all get bored in ARR and quit by level 30 or something. Getting them into Helldivers 2 was not even remotely close to difficult on the other hand lmao.

[Kaliesto]

Monetarily, you may not consider 1mln subscribers as a failure.

But you also shouldn't be considering a game on a downward trajectory as a successful thing either. All it takes is for that trajectory to hit a threshold that they are not happy with before you start seeing more monetization in the game and ideas, e.g., more subscription tiers, that offer more than just additional retainers or character space per server, more cosmetic items on MogStation, more mounts which would've been suited better as in-game rewards (e.g., Shadow Wolf), and so on.

As I do honestly think they would flirt around with this ideas far sooner than they would consider turning the patch cycle and predictability on its head.

If that ever happened that just proves what everyone thought about CS3 & upper management for awhile now, and it just make more players back off from this game.

[Arrius]

For real, I literally can't get anyone IRL to play this game. They all get bored in ARR and quit by level 30 or something. Getting them into Helldivers 2 was not even remotely close to difficult on the other hand lmao.

MMO's were always a time investment on a much bigger scale.
And that's also why they are also a niché that older generations are covering, since they have grown up with this genre.

[YumieYumiki]

That ought to have an effect on the direction of the game. But even if it does it will probably take quite some months for anything significant to materialize.

The game being extremely formulaic is probably a result of highly rigid project planning and they are probably already deep into producing content that 6 month to a year away, which they can't change drastically.

It'll be interesting to see what easier smaller improvement they manage to make in the short and medium term. I bet the small announced QoL features such as increased runspeed in cities or being able to mount up while running are a result of them trying to come up with improvements that they can do right now.