Steam, LB and Quarterly Estimate Chart

[Hanayumi]

Likely continue to dip until mid way through expansion cycle like around 7.3 or so. By then more "reliable" content will retain most active players, steady climb until the pre expansion lull hits with another dip. With the announcement of mobile version, seems SE is going a different route than what other companies would with player retention, theyre instead broading the playerbase with a wide net, would not be surprised if we do actually see a nintendo version in future.

[Jeeqbit]

This Data shows engament with the product for specific platforms and time frames. Not if the game declines or not.

While it is true it is "just for specific time frames" (ie. a data point taken in isolation could just be people taking a break), the point of the graph is to show the long-term trends and whether, over the long term, it increases or declines. In other words, it DOES show if the game declines or not.

Also "dying" for an MMO is slow and not fast.

True, which is why this chart shows the long-term trends for the last 10 years... to see if it has "slowly" declined or "slowly" grown.

Often, people will point to a data source and say it is flawed for one reason or another. But if you have multiple sources of data, measuring in different ways, all showing similar trendlines, it reinforces the credibility of the trendlines. Trendlines like this are reflected on various popular FFXIV websites and discord servers, where the activity obviously spikes after major patches.

[Banriikku]

You missunderstood me. I mean the data can not show what you said it would not because of the source (it is still problematic in a sense) but because the data do not provide the proof for "decline or no decline" of the game. This data can not tell us this. With this data you can answer : engagement for point in time or timeframe, accounts logged in for platforms, comparability for engagement on platform and overtime,

But the question is "decline or not" and this cant be told with the data you posted. Thats it.
We would need : cost per month, income per month/quarter, accounts total/payed and then how often payed aka recurring or not, budget, and so forth.
We would need to know how much paying customer and how many free to play customer are needed to maintian this game AND then we could start with "decline or not". We do not even have a baseline nor can we do a serious estimate. Based on earnings SE is on a loosing trend but has still a lot of cash/cashflow to maintain business for a couple of years. But even with the earnings report we cant talk about FF14 isolated.

But regarding the topic is "FF14 dying" this does not mean "money" because even the trash of tash makes money (remember money does not equal good - cocain anyone?) but is the game down the drain aka shit (quality).
FF14 has a lot of bad spots now that needs fixing but this game will make money even if they go full kupo-nuts on the mogstation and pay to win garbage. In that time it will earn money, sure less and less but it will do until shout down.

To make it short, the assumption was faulty, the premise was wrong and the data provided are the answer to a topic almost unrelated to the question itself. As i said the game is far from actual dying but in good spot or okay ? I dont think so.

[Axxion]

You missunderstood me. I mean the data can not show what you said it would not because of the source (it is still problematic in a sense) but because the data do not provide the proof for "decline or no decline" of the game. This data can not tell us this. With this data you can answer : engagement for point in time or timeframe, accounts logged in for platforms, comparability for engagement on platform and overtime,

But the question is "decline or not" and this cant be told with the data you posted. Thats it.
We would need : cost per month, income per month/quarter, accounts total/payed and then how often payed aka recurring or not, budget, and so forth.
We would need to know how much paying customer and how many free to play customer are needed to maintian this game AND then we could start with "decline or not". We do not even have a baseline nor can we do a serious estimate. Based on earnings SE is on a loosing trend but has still a lot of cash/cashflow to maintain business for a couple of years. But even with the earnings report we cant talk about FF14 isolated.

But regarding the topic is "FF14 dying" this does not mean "money" because even the trash of tash makes money (remember money does not equal good - cocain anyone?) but is the game down the drain aka shit (quality).
FF14 has a lot of bad spots now that needs fixing but this game will make money even if they go full kupo-nuts on the mogstation and pay to win garbage. In that time it will earn money, sure less and less but it will do until shout down.

To make it short, the assumption was faulty, the premise was wrong and the data provided are the answer to a topic almost unrelated to the question itself. As i said the game is far from actual dying but in good spot or okay ? I dont think so.

going to you last point. I think a lot of people are saying the same thing that the quality of the game is not the best right now. I mean you can log in and see people walking around and it not a ghost town

[Reinha]

Just for you all, I made a chart of FFXIV's growth and/or decline between 2014-2024.


Data Used:

• Steam (peak players logged in per month): https://steamdb.info/app/39210/charts/#max
• Lucky Bancho (active non-trial characters over 2-4 month intervals): https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/cat_1313670.html
• SE (recurring monthly income divided by the sub fee): https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/i...financial.html
• Achievements Enabled (invested players with big sunk cost and their behaviour, by Lucky Bancho): https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckyban...e68406d8-s.png

- Yellow graph is hard to read so I'll ignore it.

- The other three data sources show a trend of growth until early 2022, after which the game began its first decline. Summer 2024 shows another peak, but on all 3 colors that peak never reaches as high as it was in 2022. Both peaks are also followed by the biggest falloffs in the game's history, when it comes to login numbers (blue).

- Current player activity level seems to be around the same as in autumn 2023.

- In the Lucky Bancho data the number of active characters (red) seems to correlate with the number of invested players (green) even if the number of invested players remains more steady. The more active characters there are, the more invested players there are, and the same applies inversely.

- However, the amount of Steam logins (blue) has seen relative growth compared to Lucky Bancho data since around 2018. It seems that nowadays more people login to the game without making any changes to their character or progression. At first I thought it might be people logging in just to keep their house, but auto demolition was implemented in 2015. Perhaps things like role playing and new game plus have increased the amount of people who log in but do not partake in game content in a way that would be tracked as activity/changes in the Lodestone (Lucky Bancho data source).

- It is hard to make future predictions because the data shows that previous post-launch declines have turned into growth (2020) or kept declining (2022-2023).