Quote Originally Posted by Ath192 View Post
If we're also going to cite player counts here XIV just dropped to its lowest player count since Jan 2021 before the WOW exodus brought in a huge surge of players to the run up to Endwalker. So I would say the game isn't doing super hot, failed to capitalize on retaining the huge new growth and is receiving negative press currently. It will remain to be seen if Dawntrail will bring everyone back but we'll find out. I know people like to hate on steamcharts because not everyone uses steam but I fail to see how steam users differ from their non-steam counter parts so firmly believe the trends would be similar across the board.

My guess is that Dawntrail won't be as big as Endwalker and we'll slowly shrink unless the changes make the current playerbase more happy and press/players turn more positive once more.
There are some issues here:

1) According to the forums, Steam is a completely separate player base that has largely nothing to do with the rest of the game, so their numbers don't count at all. The official census is from Lucky Bancho, who shows that the player base is still exploding like it was in 2021. If you disagree, you will be called a troll, or worse, you will be called me.

2) Many people say that journalists are only accurate when they're saying good things about the game, since the good things are facts and the bad things are not. If a journo says something negative, then he or she is only doing it for clicks and page views.

3) Everyone generally agrees that Dawntrail will bring a ton of people back. There will be massive login queues and the game will be massively popular.

Keep in mind that we are in a designated "play other games" period. Yoshi-P even assigned us games that He wants us to play instead of FFXIV. Did you beat all of them? If not, you are not upholding His will and doing as He instructed. FFXIV is the "play other games" game where, during the officially designated period, you shall not play. Except you should, because there's an unlimited amount of things to do, and if you don't play, we will see you tomorrow you troll. Does that make sense?