FF14 player count reached the lowest point in 4 years. We lost 75% of the playerbase.

[CuteBucket]

While the player base is smaller, it's no where near 75%.



Steam does NOT and has never accounted for the majority of players.




Most players either use consoles or the official launcher.


"omg playerbase is down 75%" and producing statistics for the minority platform is just being ignorant.

Wow, would you look at that, yet another person who has no idea how statistics and sample sizes work, and who also ignores the Lucky Bancho numbers. How many of you are there? Are y'all not tired yet of having this same point debunked for 15 pages?

Yes, it's more complicated than just "we've lost 75% of the player base," but if you think these numbers aren't representative of the player base and are completely fine...more than simply ignorance, that is delusion.

[Striker44]

Wow, would you look at that, yet another person who has no idea how statistics and sample sizes work, and who also ignores the Lucky Bancho numbers. How many of you are there? Are y'all not tired yet of having this same point debunked for 15 pages?

Yes, it's more complicated than just "we've lost 75% of the player base," but if you think these numbers aren't representative of the player base and are completely fine...more than simply ignorance, that is delusion.

Sample size is largely irrelevant when the sample itself isn't statistically random (which it isn't, at all). What you need to look at are the average daily logins, and those show nothing abnormal compared to similar points in previous expansions. DT is now at the 8-month mark, and has "lost" about 40% of its average daily logins compared to its release month. At the same 8-month mark, EW had lost 49% and ShB had lost 39%. Not only have we lost nowhere near "75%" of the playerbase, but there is zero evidence we are actually seeing anything out of the ordinary. The real difference is that the specific subset of players DT has "lost" are the type that are most likely to inhabit places like Reddit or leave Steam reviews. Pare that away, look at the hard data, and you'll see it's nothing out of the ordinary.

[CuteBucket]

Sample size is largely irrelevant when the sample itself isn't statistically random (which it isn't, at all).

And once again, you have yet to provide any logical reason why Steam players are different enough as a cohort to render them statistically irrelevant.

[DPZ2]

And once again, you have yet to provide any logical reason why Steam players are different enough as a cohort to render them statistically irrelevant.

All one can gather from the Steam Charts is that fewer people are actively playing at the same time. How do you equate that with "losing 75% of the playerbase"?

And what is meant by the term "losing"? Because last time I checked, Steam does not report subscription numbers for online games. Those numbers are more important to Square Enix's bottom line. I don't count 17.3 billion yen in profits as "losing".

[BigCheez]

All one can gather from the Steam Charts is that fewer people are actively playing at the same time. How do you equate that with "losing 75% of the playerbase"?

And what is meant by the term "losing"? Because last time I checked, Steam does not report subscription numbers for online games. Those numbers are more important to Square Enix's bottom line. I don't count 17.3 billion yen in profits as "losing".

Occam's razor.

Steam's average player numbers dropping significantly without the total number of players being affected would require a very strange set of circumstances in which everyone had continued to play the game, but less regularly, and were also somehow managing to coordinate when they play the game to avoid being online at the same time. Logically, you would expect there to be times like the evenings and weekends where people's play time would naturally overlap, resulting in more concurrent players.

When you combine this with the data from the Lucky Bancho report, reduced number of logs on FFLogs, reduced engagement in online communities, YouTube and Twitch, reduced PF activity in game, longer queue times and anecdotal evidence that literally everyone I know has stopped playing the game (there are 76 players in my FC, 50% have been offline for more than 2 months. 60% have been offline for more than 2 weeks. 90% have been offline for more than a week), it's pretty obvious that a majority of the playerbase is not actively playing at the minute.

Trying to suggest otherwise would be a fairly impressive level of cope.

[DPZ2]

Occam's razor.

Through Occam's Razor, increased sales over 3 quarters from a previous year should indicate the company is making more money this year than last. Since money earned through subscriptions is a good chunk of those profits, a significant downturn in the playerbase should result in a decided drop in those profits.

Your 'average players' still says nothing about the actual number of subscribers.

There are problems with the Lucky Bancho report. The biggest is that it drops players leveling from 1 through 70 because it cannot discern between free to play and paying subscribers. The second biggest is that it does not report on subscriptions, because those numbers are not present. The third biggest is that it inflates the number of active players based on the number of characters in the game, not the number of accounts paying a subscription. Go ask the alt-aholic contingent whether they have more than 1 character on their account.

The only report I've read recently indicates a drop from 1.4 million characters to about 1.03 million characters in the latest report, decidedly not anywhere near the click-bait of 75%.

If the argument is that Steam Chart numbers drop off between patches, or that that 95k concurrent player mark will never be reached again (that occurred one month before Endwalker released, mind you), or that the release of other games is as likely to attract a Steam player as this one, you've got my acknowledgement.

The use of terms like 'crater' and 'catastrophic' do not yet apply.

[BigCheez]

Through Occam's Razor, increased sales over 3 quarters from a previous year should indicate the company is making more money this year than last. Since money earned through subscriptions is a good chunk of those profits, a significant downturn in the playerbase should result in a decided drop in those profits.

Your 'average players' still says nothing about the actual number of subscribers.

There are problems with the Lucky Bancho report. The biggest is that it drops players leveling from 1 through 70 because it cannot discern between free to play and paying subscribers. The second biggest is that it does not report on subscriptions, because those numbers are not present. The third biggest is that it inflates the number of active players based on the number of characters in the game, not the number of accounts paying a subscription. Go ask the alt-aholic contingent whether they have more than 1 character on their account.

The only report I've read recently indicates a drop from 1.4 million characters to about 1.03 million characters in the latest report, decidedly not anywhere near the click-bait of 75%.

If the argument is that Steam Chart numbers drop off between patches, or that that 95k concurrent player mark will never be reached again (that occurred one month before Endwalker released, mind you), or that the release of other games is as likely to attract a Steam player as this one, you've got my acknowledgement.

The use of terms like 'crater' and 'catastrophic' do not yet apply.

I don't care how much money SE are making. I care about the quality of the game and service that I'm receiving for my money. I'm also not here to make bold claims about 75% of the playerbase having jumped ship. You can take that up with the OP.

While you're right in that the Lucky Bancho report is not a complete dataset because it doesn't include non-max level players, we don't need a complete dataset. We need a large enough sample size to accurately gauge player behaviour. A sample size of 1.4 million characters is definitely a large enough sample size to do that. We could reasonably assume that retention has been better for players who are still playing through the MSQ because they haven't arrived at Dawntrail and aren't dealing with the current issues, but the discourse here is primarily about the current state of endgame and how that has affected the active (and now inactive) playerbase.

What we can see is that the drop from 1.4m active characters to 1 million (and probably lower now because the report was a month or so ago) is a much larger percentage change than we're used to seeing at this point in an expansion, and that definitely tells us that something is wrong and should probably change in future expansions.

I think the word "catastrophic" is definitely a fitting descriptor for the reception to Dawntrail's launch period. It's been littered with issues so far. Here's hoping that things improve.

[Kohashi]

Snip.

I doubt many would see a reason to your arguments because most here are too busy repeating themselves into oblivion over what is a grossly inaccurate flawed representation of a number.

While numbers are indeed low I would say they follow pretty much the trend of every patch cycle with the outlier being the time when we had Covid and people had nothing else to do so naturally the numbers were much higher. If you do look at the chart you see the same dips in numbers every single time for every single damn expansion.

Also patch 7.1 hardly had any content. Is the game in trouble? We shall see with the 7.2 more accurately when long-term content gets dropped.

[NightHour]

Wow, would you look at that, yet another person who has no idea how statistics and sample sizes work, and who also ignores the Lucky Bancho numbers. How many of you are there? Are y'all not tired yet of having this same point debunked for 15 pages?

Yes, it's more complicated than just "we've lost 75% of the player base," but if you think these numbers aren't representative of the player base and are completely fine...more than simply ignorance, that is delusion.

I know the player base has declined, it's not 75% at all.

It's probably more like 25%.



It's nothing more than the natural course of MMO's.

We are not in 2010 anymore when MMO's were the cool thing to play.

Every MMO / live service game experiences periods of player count increases and decreases, it's natural to the type of game.



That doesn't mean I think there aren't any issues with the game because there absolutely is.


There's a lot of things XIV could do to retain players.


Shorter patch cycles and schedules (Like waiting until a .x5 for a criterion dungeon is insane)
Not time gating content behind .5 and .8 patches
Not taking nearly a year to unlock the raid tier (especially when the raid tier has an ultimate tied to it)
Tomes should also uncap earlier too.


etc etc


In regards to "Not taking nearly a year to unlock the raid tier (especially when the raid tier has an ultimate tied to it)".


In my opinion, If the raid tier in question has an ultimate tied to it then the raid tier should unlock either when the ultimate releases or say a week or 2 after the world race for the ultimate is over.

As for raid tiers without an ultimate, they should unlock on the next major odd patch.

Like unlocking the 7.2 raid series at 7.3. 7.4 at 7.5 etc.

Sometimes you have to flex roles or jobs and the raid tier being locked for so long doesn't make that possible.