Quote Originally Posted by Jeeqbit View Post
The first piece is the peak number of people who actively had the game open via Steam each month over 10 years (this is blue).

The second piece of data is Lucky Bancho's active characters stats, released every few months (this is red). It notices when there is a change on their lodestone profile such as mounts, minions, exp, gear, world. Of course, they do all sorts of work to account for bots and exclude free trials.

These are well known pieces of data, completely unchanged.

The third piece of data is from Square Enix's quarterly reports, which I explained in a lot of detail. It's not sales, but rather recurring income, which should mean things like subscriptions, but I'm not really an expert on their finances. It's divided by the subscription fee in Yen to estimate subscription numbers, but won't ever be exact unless SE releases subscription numbers. It just shows us where the spikes are (ie. people resubscribing).

There is consistent growth as you said. There was a peak at the end of 2021 due to the game going viral on twitch, so it's not entirely fair to count that, but Dawntrail has actually come very close to it and SE said there were more concurrent users in Dawntrail than any prior expansion. After coming close to the 2021 peak, there is a subsequent massive drop according to the Steam data, but it remains to be seen if it will recover when 7.1 or 7.2 releases (it probably will).

But my aim is to show the comparison to everyone here without bias. If the game is "dying" as some people on these forums like to suggest, and the data reflects it, then I won't dispute it. It's just there for all to see and interpret however they want.
We also have financials that shows that the EW period made more money than any other expansion, much to this dismay and disbelief of most here. Data isn't really useful on these forums. Most people have made a hobby out of lying in wait for something to complain about, and have been doing so for years. Says more about them than the game.