Quote Originally Posted by Kohashi View Post
Judging by Google trends I would say the population decline, which is normal, shows nothing meaningful and it's only a buzzword to bait engagement/clicks.

The interest for FF14 has been steady for the past 90 days.

https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...F064ln09&hl=en

And roughly the same in the past year: https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...F064ln09&hl=en

Except for the spike when the new expansion launched, which was also to be expected.
Goggle trends only show how often people searched for that game and not how they engaged with it itself.
The last month FF14 mobile also had more search results that would be included in the normal FF14 search.
The there is also FF14 having quite a number of news articles since DT launched as well as people being just curious about the feedback DT got and searching for it.
Even FF11 has no trend in google searches and that game is in maintenance mode.
As far as I have seen WoW also a pretty constant search history despite it's... problems in the past but I don't know enough about that game to get a connection with releases.

Google trends is not really a good tool to look how happy the playerbase is or how many play the game poitive or negative.
Luckybancho is pretty much the best source of info we have available for player numbers and not a google trend...