Quote Originally Posted by Erinellza View Post
What I see on the Steam charts is that when I started playing in October 2019 we had 9,7k average players and now we have 22,9k. XIV has grown a lot compared to when I started playing and it has a high population for its age.
This. We're posting in a Titanman thread, but all his Steam data ever really showed was that at every single comparable data point along the way, EW had a higher active playerbase than ShB (and likewise ShB outdid SB, SB outdid HW, and so on). When I say comparable data points, I mean looking at the launch of 5.1 versus 6.1, or just before 5.3 versus just before 6.3, etc..

There's only an anomaly because of the "WoW exodus" that caused a massive spike followed by most of that spike going elsewhere, which was always going to happen. It's not called an "FFXIV influx" but rather a "WoW exodus" because these players were never the target audience of FFXIV, anyway. They were just fleeing WoW, and FFXIV is its biggest competitor, so they naturally found their way over here. But they were never going to stay. FFXIV would have had to massively redesign itself and just try to be WoW if they wanted to keep them...which likely wouldn't have succeeded, and alienated FFXIV's actual target audience in the process.