FF14 is utterly dominating despite not even having a new content patch (if you click in to FF it says it is actually above 3 million currently) - of note is FF14 has been massively increasing subs despite zero new content, and is retaining those players
New World is obviously in a launch peak but who knows if that will last (it is #1 because of how the site tracks trending metrics as well)
and good ole runescape just keeps putting up strong numbers (click in and see that it is 2.5 million active daily players)
wow currently hanging at a million daily players, it isn’t dying anytime soon but it is absolutely losing players - something about current wow design is chasing away an absolutely huge amount of players
It also has a new expansion coming in a month. I don’t really see that as “zero new content” as a lot of people who are just signing up now are playing through the old story in order to be ready for Endwalker when it comes out in November. (It’ll take something like 60 hours I would estimate to play the existing story.) People are preordering and intending to be subbed when the big day arrives.
I tried playing FF but it’s too cringy. I think the people playing it make it that way, not the actual game. I met a few people that as soon as they found out I’m a girl irl tried to force me into ERP which was super weird.
To make the point Teranin is making super clear, MMO Population estimates game population by measuring activity for the game on social media sites like Reddit and Twitter. If people are talking about a game a lot on those sites, it raises its estimates.
I wonder if a game might be talked about more if it has a major expansion coming in a month.
Thing is that site itself also says they’re only “estimating” the players and subs for all these games. Mostly by just social media and other odd stats that are sure to give a weird wrong answer. Basically guessing in the dark.
So those subs are still in no way accurate. Only Blizz can tell us the true sub numbers and player activity, no one else can possibly know them. Ranking sites and internet forums don’t factor in every player.
Being 4th on that list really doesn’t mean anything at all. And I highly doubt WoW’s down to 1 million.
Wows only hope lies with 10.0 which HAS to have HUGE SWEEPING changes to regain its lost player base.
No systems being the biggest one
A new highly asked for class
A new highly asked for race
Loosen weapon/transmog restrictions
Player housing.
New race/class options
Class skins
They have to check at least a couple of these new features in order to bounce back as picking only one of these options won’t do it anymore.
Like if 10.0 was just no systems but also no new classes/skins/races with a promise of “more balance and better class design” I wouldn’t resub as I wouldn’t have any faith that they would fix the classes after 4 years of saying they would. Hell even without a new class to balance they still ignore a few specs.
There’s an old analogy that applies to the retail stans, “if you have to be pitched a perfect game to see injustice, you never wanted to see it in the first place”
In the same way retail fanboys always reject their version of the game is floundering because they can always find a hole to poke somewhere in the data. They hide in that huge safe space called Blizzards silence and lack of transparency.
Oh I very much doubt that the game population isn’t declining. I’m not an idiot. If I had to guess I would estimate the current subs at somewhere around the 1.5 to 2 million mark. But there’s no way for me to be confident in that number.
However I also don’t think that agreeing with the conclusion reached with data is a good reason to accept shaky data. Nor do I think that momentary snapshots of MMO population is a good way to rank MMOs more generally since that sort of thing fluctuates over time. Bad data is bad data.
I suppose I could be considered a retail fanboy, but there’s no denying that the player base has declined substantially, especially over the last year. In fact, the only reason I resubbed was because they are making some pretty significant changes to the systems in Shadowlands I hate. It turns out that I actually have things to do right now, which is nice.
I had been gone from the game since roughly a week and a half into Shadowlands, which is a heck of a long time for me. Still salty about the state of the game, but I’m trying to enjoy it in what ways I can. I’m definitely not oblivious to the current state of things though. I see it every time I log on, and it makes me sad.
