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

[Clockworks]

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)


etc etc

As of december 2024, the game according to luckybanchos already had lost about 30% of it's population (down from 1.4 mils to barely under a million)

Your 25% estimate implies that people... came back for exactly nothing, and mind you, this was also inside a free campaign period.

As of august 2024, there were 42181 players on average playing the game on steam, as of today we are at 16481 which is a decrease of 60%. (and yes steam is a big enough sample)