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