Thread: 18.5% drop in players in only 8 weeks

IMHO, Guild Wars 2 is a better game than ESO in multiple aspects and is not generating the same hype. I would blame: marketing, lack of visual fidelity and introduction is childish for some races. Open World exploration and progress is great, but after a while is boring. GW2 has a loyal community and is way better than Lost Ark and New World in terms of stability. ESO positive aspects: the name Elder Scrolls (marketing), immersive quests and multiple choices. Negative: paywall everywhere and most expensive sub (premium) system available.

Talking about FFXIV, FFXIV has the potential to create hype and draw attention, the name (brand) is strong like Elder Scrolls or Warcraft and the audience plots (TwitchTracker) shows the same behavior as World of Warcraft - a game 19 years old. That's all we can say with our superficial data. Anything beyond this is a mere speculation. We can combine lodestone data and XIVCensus but only SE knows the truth.

Based on my daily experience, I see sprouts everywhere all the time and my queue times are lower than ShB days. We can't measure our retention. For now, i would say that any decline isn't a big surprise for Yoshida, he said it himself multiple times. However, as the hype/audience graphics are showing, it's a constant build up and decline. If Guild Wars 2 is active as a flatline in steam charts and survived for years before steam and even WoW still receive some attention after everything weird going on... i can't see a dark future for FFXIV. They need to make 3x the effort they did in ARR to ruin this game.