According to steam FF14 has way more players than WoW. 
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People think theyâre being clever by knocking the steam statistics, but they do show us what direction the population is trending.
20k+ is far larger than what youâd need for a sample size. Itâs also weird to argue so fiercely against the population decrease considering theyâre in a patch deadzone.
They knock them because they matter a hill of beans, really. Steam users are only part of the PC playerbase, which in turn is only part of the entire playerbase. Playing the game you see far more people playing from the launcher or Playstation than you do from Steam. Least of the people Iâve personally interacted with.
As for the patch⌠Theyâve released multiple patches since Endwalker released, and while itâs true that some of those were just tuning, there was still the 6.05 content patch. Next week weâre getting 6.1, and that comes with heaps of stuff such as a new Alliance and Ultimate raids, new story quests (MSQ, Tataru, and Hildibrand), new housing, integration of Trust into ARR dungeons, new PvP mode, a new Tribe reputation, a questline and xp turn in for crafters, Faux Hollows returning (old raids scaled up for cosmetic rewards), and a ton of fixes and class balance stuff. FF14 gets a new numbered patch every 4 months or so, with half patches in between. They put out content much faster than WoW does, and generally have more varied activities to play with when they do.
Er, and speaking in respect to the population, while I do not have actual numbers, of course, I do know that even when I queue as a DPS I never have to wait too long to get into any dungeons or raids I want to do. When I queue as a healer the wait is basically instant. Their population is certainly not hurting.
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You do realize that mmo populations website just uses a formula based on the reddit sections information?
Subscription numbers arenât the main factor of an MMOs financial success anymore as things like the WoW token, store items, and merchandise make up a large portion of WoWs income. To put things in perspective WoW grosses more in one quarter than the other top 2-3 MMOs combined do in a year.
SquareEnix doesnât make a lot of money on FF14 which is why it takes them a year to upgrade their servers and why their budget isnât very high. Itâs really the same issue with a lot of the other MMOs. GW2 makes less money than other games NCSoft owns that are 10 years older. A lack of steady income is usually what kills MMOs more than anything as they enter maintenance mode after staff cuts.
Itâs somehow how WoW is still around after 17 years.
Not really. If steam numbers drop 50%, it very likely means overall population has dropped 50%. We also have zero idea how much of the population they make up because Squeenix has never released population numbers.
Unlike with WoW, we actually have a frame of reference to estimate what direction the population is going. Any time anyone speculated on how many players either game has, they are literally pulling imaginary numbers out of their rare. At least Steam gives us a trend based on real data.
Using this as an example of the population not dropping shows a wild misunderstanding of howâŚanything works. Your queue times will be the same whether there are 10 million players or 1 million players as long as the role makeup stays the same.
I was using it more of an example of how the game feels to play. I do not mind if there are less people than WoW overall, but the game is healthy enough that people are running old content constantly, and I donât have to wait to get into dungeons. I see people everywhere I go in the world, at all levels. I was saying that thatâs enough for me. Game doesnât have to âbeatâ WoW. Iâm just happy itâs healthy and thriving.
True enough, I misunderstood your intentions.
Yes, people get far too caught up in how many subs a game has. It only matters if there are enough subs to do the content.
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Eh, no worries. I could have been more clear.
I absolutely agree though. One of my favourite MMOs has a super teeny population, but everyone bands together to help out everyone else. Heh, weâre all too stubborn to leave, so we prop each other up. 
