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

[Exinias]

you can really feel in endwalker that they hamfisted everything to try to conclude in one expansion. we were supposed to get a garlemald expansion, but apparently it is better to rush and cobble together all plot threads at once when your game is very successful. i am very bitter about this still. why rush greatness.

Not even remotely true.

[Daralii]

Not even remotely true.

"We planned to use 5.0 till 7.0 to end our decade-long Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc and bring everything to its climax. Originally, 6.0 was meant to focus on the Garlean Empire. However, 5.0's reception exceeded our expectations, so we decided to condense the Empire's storyline to allow for greater developments."

https://reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion...n_taiwan_2025/
Posting a Reddit link with a translation because the actual transcript is obviously in Chinese.

[Drimn]

https://reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion...n_taiwan_2025/
Posting a Reddit link with a translation because the actual transcript is obviously in Chinese.

This is the most bizarre line of thinking I think I've ever seen. "People love what we're doing and are invested in our very successful story, so we'll blitz through the conclusion in such an unsatisfying way that the big bad that we've spent 10 years hyping up is a midboss loot pinata, all so we can hurry to The Passion of the Wuk?" Where is the logic here?

[Exmo]

This is the most bizarre line of thinking I think I've ever seen. "People love what we're doing and are invested in our very successful story, so we'll blitz through the conclusion in such an unsatisfying way that the big bad that we've spent 10 years hyping up is a midboss loot pinata, all so we can hurry to The Passion of the Wuk?" Where is the logic here?

SHB was much more popular than Stormblood. Devs rightfully interpreted that to mean players preferred all the business with shards, ascian and light vs dark to all the garlemald stuff. So they used this feedback and focused on what players seemed to enjoy.

You can't please everyone of course.

[BlisteringFrost]

SHB was much more popular than Stormblood. Devs rightfully interpreted that to mean players preferred all the business with shards, ascian and light vs dark to all the garlemald stuff. So they used this feedback and focused on what players seemed to enjoy.

You can't please everyone of course.

I wonder what happened during SHB that kept people at home for 3 years....

What could it POSSIBLY be..... Hm....

[Striker44]

I wonder what happened during SHB that kept people at home for 3 years....

What could it POSSIBLY be..... Hm....

They're talking popularity as in satisfaction/reviews, not sheer numbers. ShB had significantly inflated population numbers because of Covid and then the WoW Exodus near the end, but it's also rated as the best expansion in practically every online survey. DT is a great example of how something can have a huge population (DT had the highest sales of any expansion) but not be rated highly. It's not just that a lot of people were playing ShB, it's that they were also shouting its praises.

[Exmo]

I wonder what happened during SHB that kept people at home for 3 years....

What could it POSSIBLY be..... Hm....

Shadowbringers was released July 2019, well before the first lockdowns hit, and received critical acclaim well before its popularity boon later into the patch cycle. It's safe to assume a two year lead into each expansion, so the decision to focus less on Garlemald probably occurred over a year before the Lockdown+Exodus numbers came in.

With that established, those who compare current numbers against Lockdown+Exodus numbers would have us believe this is a fair comparison, as if external factors are consistent and equal. Which they obviously aren't. It's much more coherent to compare current numbers against StB and early patch ShB numbers. With that in perspective, thread titles like this one are clearly just bait.