Earlier this year, I (and many others) cancelled our WoW subscription after I found out they (Activision-Blizzard) laid off around 700 of their staff, after posting their highest ever recorded turnover/profit. The reason for the layoffs, to increase profit even more, at a time when they have no new games/IP's coming out (WoW Classic not really counting), when they just lost Destiny 2 and they were already having bad press for the quality of the content coming out. Then a month or so after that, reports were doing the rounds about how poorly their staff were treated and paid, compared to the norm in Silicon Valley.

So around this period, I started to notice a few different MMO/WoW channels on YouTube and Twitch were making content for alternative subscription based MMORPG's and FF14 was always being mentioned as a viable option for ex WoW players to go to. Then you see how much effort SE/Yoshi P put into keeping the players updated and informed about what is going on with the future of the game, it's no hard to see why numbers are improving a great deal this year.