So SE has officially stated their MMO profits have tanked.

[Qyoon]

Game feels like it's basicly dead, been waiting for 15 min to do the new dungeon as a healer.
If i have to do dungeons alone with bad AI, what the point of paying a subscription at this point ?
Make it offline for 15€, because thats what it's worth imo.

[Zakuyia]

Hopefully they won't repeat what ever the heck dawntrail was for 8.0 cause ppl claiming Dawntrail was the best thing since peanut butter and jelly and no argument.....them FINANCIAL LOSSES WANT A WORD WITH YA. Yeah.....dawntrail is truly one of the worse....almost sad to say cause it doing the same thing stormblood did, yet stormblood post game completely destroys dawntrail post game due to it being actually good.

[Zakuyia]

4.x/shadowbringers was what locked us into this mess

At the same time Shadowbringers story writing was 20x better than what ever dawntrail was trying to do.... so its good and bad without the losing player counts and sub counts. Dawntrail is the we tried a new idea but realized that our new idea was completely stupid now.....

[Jeeqbit]

A lot of people in this thread just looking at numbers without the context. The context being that its YoY, that is the numbers are compared to the same time last year. What happened the same time last year? We had a major expansion release.

You're not looking at the context either. The context is Endwalker's population (on Lucky Bancho) was well over 1.2 million and this did not get lower even during patch lulls. So at minimum, Dawntrail should be 1.2 million duing patch lulls, if not more since an expansion's baseline usually grows by at least 200,000, which would put us at 1.4 mil.

Instead, we're at 900,000 because people are disappointed. My whole explanation of it is at https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6735003

And the chart with data that I made in Google Docs shows we are at Shadowbringers levels and that this is unprecedented:


You have to go back to 2020 or 2021 to see levels this low. This is true for the Steam stats, the Lucky Bancho stats and the Achievement Hunter stats.

[kajv95]

*Great breakdown on the fact that things are unapologetically messed up right now*

When even Jeeqbit isn't trying to shine a positive light on an FFXIV-related situation, you know things are rough.

[Qyoon]

Even Calyx don't wanna be there, dude himself is bored af for simply existing in the game...

[Striker44]

A few things I think are important to keep in mind here:

A.) This isn't covid-related at this point. It's comparing last year to this year, not 2020/2021 to this year. Things like more people staying home, playing games, etc. has already long since sorted itself out.

B.) The data is primarily about sales, not active players. The relevant time period last year was the lead up to DT, which had the highest sales of any FFXIV expansion. This year is a "between" year for expansions. Of course sales are going to be lower. I'm quite confident if someone dug up similar reports from past years we'd see the same exact YoY trends between years that have new expansions releasing vs. those that don't.

C.) For those hoping the game will "change direction," I have two pieces of bad news. The first is that it doesn't need to. Remember, this game was still considered very profitable back in the ARR-->SB days, and even with the DT drop, it's still well above those levels. And that was before the cosmetic cash shop really got going. Simple fact is that FFXIV could still drop about 40-50% of its remaining players and remain one of SE's more profitable ventures.

D.) The second piece of bad news - FFXIV has completed its main storyline. Simple fact. Look at other long-running games and you'll see that the "end" of the main storyline becomes the peak of the playerbase, and then it never really recovers to anything close after that. It's happening right now with Destiny 2. It happened years ago with WoW and their Lich King expansion (despite being only a couple expansions in, it was the culmination of a storyline that started all the way back in the previous game - Warcraft III). WoW had a peak of around 12 million players when finishing the Arthas storyline. Since then? It plummeted the very next expansion, and it recently took what are being viewed as two "solid" expansions in a row just to get back up to around 2 million players (meaning over 80% of its one-time playerbase has left and never returned). FFXIV is there now. Endwalker finished it's main story. The climax is over. Anything else they come up with is just "falling action" to make a plot analogy. Personally, I just keep that in mind and set my expectations appropriately, and I've continued having a blast playing DT.

[Larirawiel]

Dawntrail is the we tried a new idea but realized that our new idea was completely stupid now.....

There are not even new ideas in DT. It is basically a reskinned EW, and EW is a reskinned ShB etc. They literary changed the facade but the core of the game is almost exactly the same. It is like eating potato salad every day. Even if you vary some spice for it, at one day, you will not be able to eat it for a long time. FF14 is in the same state ATM.


Cheers

[TheDustyOne]

I honestly can't remember but I wouldn't be surprised if the War of the Magi was caused by the ancients in some form as well.

Every calamity (so the flood that came about from the War of the Magi) was all part of the Ascians plan to try and resurrect Zodiark, so yes even the War of the Magi was still the ancients.

I have nothing else to contribute to this thread, just saw this and had to add to it. .

[lievaordiea]

Shame they're still stuck with another year of -Dawntrail- and it's horrible reputation souring the login screen. If I were them, I'd cut the losses entirely, get someone to throw up a new title card as far removed from DT as possible, and treat 7.4 as a soft reboot. Have the next msq quest start at sharlayan without anyone even so much as mentioning anything that happened since 7.0. Just scrub it from the story altogether. Don't build on rotten roots

i changed my title card to ARR as i have some alts redoing it XD its so much nicer, you are correct. i can pretend (when not doing msq or playing my lvl 100) that DT doesnt exist.