Will Fan Fest 2026 turn things around after Dawntrail?
770,000 players
“Is this game dead?”
Jesus Christ people 🤦♂️
The article kind of touches on something that is very important to understand about that figure, but misses some key details
First of all, that census is unofficial. They gather metrics based on publicly available achievement data.
However, they changed the default status of player’s achievements in 7.0. It used to be public by default, now it is private by default
The game definitely experienced a sharper drop off in players than during Endwalker, don’t get me wrong. Dawntrail itself is pretty messy, and to be honest another major factor is that everyone just played the game nonstop during covid and got burnt out all at the same time lol.
But the Lucky Bancho numbers have always been weird. We simply don’t have access to the real numbers, just different methods of estimating the trend line
What I was getting at is that 770,000 is a massive number of players most multiplayer games can only dream of. People get way too worked up about player numbers changing.
Gotcha, yeah just giving context on why people are seeing that number and thinking it’s really small. If you look at the lifetime graph from the same source it paints a very dramatic drop-off compared to other sources, like steamdb
yeah that seemed pretty big to me to.
I get that it seems like an exaggeration but there’s a lot to ff14 that can’t be summarized simply or easily. The headline is spot on.
The community at large is worried if the next expansion fails.
MMOs are costly to develop, Square Enix has shown time and time again that their funding goes towards everything they have except FF14. Even the most casual players joke that FF14’s “ten devs” can’t handle x change proposal.
The game has a lot of technical debt, and many issues have existed for a long time with the game server design, and that just scratches the surface.
The game’s content patch cycle is under heavy scrutiny by the community for being too thin and spread out and having little repeatable content.
I hope SE designs something where my friends and I can dive into and have a repeatable source of entertainment and fun. There’s literally nothing like this.
I would expand more but this could turn into a very long rant about current systems that are strangely socially punishing (punished for playing with friends).
I bought dawntrail because I wanted to play beast master. I quit about a year and a half ago, and beast master still isn’t out.
I really hope they do radical changes to this game, only because I hear most of the early game content is kind of a grind to get through and it seems like the game should be more systemic and a little less “grind through MSQ/Required Quests until you get to where the people are”. In this regard, XI private servers have been a little bet better to engage with as the game is a little less structured than modern MMOs (though who has the time for raw XI anymore, anyway?)
A friend of mine I think said it best when they said ‘FFXIV put its worst foot forward’. The first game (story arc?) is just not that interesting story wise, and doing the story is the only viable way to level up and get to better content. My friends who play it a lot were horrified to hear that my gameplay consisted of teleport to a location, skip a cutscene, talk to a person and then teleport back until they realized I was still in ARR.
Heavensward’s story IS a lot better, but after having to go through all those hours of skipped cutscenes I was really wanting something else to do to level up.
“Failed expansion” is sexist gater talk as a result of having a woman main character for the xpac.
Do you have any evidence of that whatsoever or just making that up, I enjoyed the story with wuk and nobody I personally know disliked her
