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

[gw1fan]

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)

While about 95k peak players is a large enough sample to be significant, is it a REPRESNETATIVE sample? It's hard to get exact numbers, but Steam has only recently started growing in JP, mainly with Steam Deck adoption which XIV is playable on SD but not optimized. Therefore, my interpretation is Steam users are more likely to be NA players than any other region which does not match the estimated population distribution between regions. Thus, the Steam numbers are more likely to reflect the highly fluctuating NA population than an overall trend slightly more accurately depicted in the Lucky Bancho chart which displays the 28% shift

[PercibelTheren]

While about 95k peak players is a large enough sample to be significant, is it a REPRESNETATIVE sample? It's hard to get exact numbers, but Steam has only recently started growing in JP, mainly with Steam Deck adoption which XIV is playable on SD but not optimized. Therefore, my interpretation is Steam users are more likely to be NA players than any other region which does not match the estimated population distribution between regions. Thus, the Steam numbers are more likely to reflect the highly fluctuating NA population than an overall trend slightly more accurately depicted in the Lucky Bancho chart which displays the 28% shift

I think if anything, Steam is likely to be EU players because consoles, broadly speaking, are not as common here as they are over in the US, where I assume a lot more people play on PS or, recently, Xbox. Japan is only a small chunk of the playerbase, though. Most of it is the other regions. SE may not care but it's a significant drop either way.

[gw1fan]

I think if anything, Steam is likely to be EU players because consoles, broadly speaking, are not as common here as they are over in the US, where I assume a lot more people play on PS or, recently, Xbox. Japan is only a small chunk of the playerbase, though. Most of it is the other regions. SE may not care but it's a significant drop either way.

Good points. Like I mentioned, there's no real way to tell what regions those Steam numbers are capturing an in what proportions, so I will admit that it could be some combination of EU and NA that is unknown. However, I would like you to know that Japan is the second largest population of the XIV player base, so unless you were referring to Japan being smaller player base on Steam, this point I have to contest.

Looking at the raw numbers by server that includes totals per region in Lucky Bancho's data, only 40k of the estimated 437k that have been marked "inactive" were in JP servers. The largest population shifts were in NA servers, Gilgamesh alone losing 3.6k. For comparison, the first closest JP server in decline was Tonberry with a loss of 1.7k.