Thread: 18.5% drop in players in only 8 weeks

Lucky Bancho survey for patch 5.45: 900k active characters over level 60

Lucky Bancho survey for patch 6.45: 1.13 million active characters over level 60.

If this expansion was truly as bad as some want the public to think, shouldn't the 6.45 numbers be lower than the 5.45 numbers considering the praise that Shadowbringers garnered?

Originally Posted by Ath192

The game isn't releasing a whole lot of worthwhile content. And its trending to become more solo friendly. Everyone knows this. There are far better solo games than this one thats for sure. Therefore, the solution would be for this game to become an ever better MMO but nope. It's trying to be a better solo game and because of its MMO roots its always going to be subpar at that.

My guess is they're aiming for solo game play with an immersive social experience. It's really hard to say.

Originally Posted by LittleImp

It's reached a point where even Steamcharts probably provide a more solid overview of at least the broader trends. It would be interesting to see a comparison of the highs and lows of the last two expansions, proportionally.

Steamcharts have been showing a pretty steady decline for several months but nobody wanted to believe it because they're used to Steamcharts being used by bad actors to show them just the small player count and not the actual player trends. It's reasonable to assume that trends among steam's players are affecting regular-launcher players as well, barring some freak accident with the steam launcher that ruins their ability to play or something. I'm glad Bancho has put out their own similar results, because it lets us finally get on the same page about the current situation.

I actually think that dude on page 1 is right though. In ShB I recall it being pretty deadish until EW got announced, and then it picked up again. Loads of people just drop the game during the lengthy in-between periods where nothing's happening. The real issue though, is EW was hyped as the finale to a 10 year old story so it saw a LOT of people coming back to see how things wrapped up. Whereas 7.0 is some new chapter entirely, and the story building up to it has been hit or miss. Whether or not people will return for more of that, especially after the poor taste post-EW left in so many mouths, is anyone's guess. I think the devs might seriously freak out if they announce 7.0 and the game continues to lose players due to how they've bungled and mismanaged post-EW at every turn. Like, yeah, go ahead and keep putting obvious content items in the cash shop while the base game grows cobwebs, act more and more like ActivisionBlizzard and this is where it gets you. On the bright side, if that happens, the fear of failure might push them to actually churn out some quality content instead of chilling and being content. But with how their roadmap works, the bulk of the content's already been made by now so it's too late to change course anytime soon.

idk, idk. If I'm being real honest, I'm betting a shit-ton of people will come back for 7.0 just out of habit. The current MMO landscape is so barren that XIV can basically be mediocre and still be better than most, which is really all they need to do to keep players and make money. Eh.

Originally Posted by Supersnow845

As usual jojoya missed the point so they can defend small indie company

The point isn’t that EW has overall higher players than ShB (which is to be expected because EW had the hype from ShB and WOW’s premature collapse while ShB came off the relatively flat SB), it’s that EW patches aren’t holding the playerbase like previous expansion patches are, people are unsubbing quicker and for longer

So players log in, play through the patch content they're interested in, then go play other games like TotK, D4 and FFXVI that just came out so they have had the last 10 years to be playing them.

Okay. I don't see a problem with that.

I've watched that same cycle occur many times over the years in various MMORPGs, notably WoW. There are websites out there that track player activity and it's a rare online game producing regular content updates that doesn't have a lot of peaks and valleys in its graph.

When new games were getting released, players would be taking breaks to go play the new games. Sometimes they'd even skip coming back for the new patch content because they were excited about the new game and knew the patch content would be waiting for them on their return. Other times the content patches just didn't appeal to them but they'd come back either when another did or for the next expansion.

Such cycles rarely say anything about the state of a game. Those cycles say a lot more about the state of competition in the game industry. When there's no competition drawing a player's attention away from their main game, there's no reason to let their sub lapse and most will stick with the game out of habit if nothing else. When there is competition, there is reason to stop playing so they can also enjoy those other games. A drop in active players will be seen.

Personally I think it's a good thing to see people taking extended breaks to play other games. It helps prevent burnout. It can potentially expose players to new ideas that can then be shared and possibly used to improve their main game.

You guys waste an awful lot of time and effort on doomsaying when you could spend that time and effort doing things you enjoy. That may mean not playing FFXIV for a while. A decade is an awful long time to be playing the same game with almost no break.

That's fine. Enjoy other games for a change. Maybe you decide to come back to FFXIV, maybe you get so invested in one of those other games that you leave FFXIV behind. I'd be surprised if I don't end up reaching that point myself sometimes in the future though for now I'm still having fun here. Nothing lasts forever.

And that's okay. My life doesn't revolve around whether or not I'm playing a game, let alone this game in particular.

Do what is best for you. I don't think banging your head against a wall trying to convince other people who are happy with the game to embrace your doomsaying is in your best interests.

Originally Posted by Koros

how can anyone see this and think ff14 succeeded lmao

it's like someone just giving you 5 million gold bars and 2 years later they're all already gone with nothing to show

you'll never get this chance again, ff14 had its shot and failed. sad

Some thing most of the content creators that moved over from WoW realized fairly quickly and have commented on:

Those who watch FFXIV streamers are more interested in MSQ and other major side story content reactions. Races for world firsts on Savage and Ultimate will also create minor spikes in viewership but that's about it. There's no strong PvP content that tends to generate a lot of the viewership like in other games. Viewers lose interest when all the streamer has to show is raid/trial farms.

So try mapping what was happening in game during those viewership peaks. You might get some answers.