During a recent Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker preview event (via Easy Allies), director Naoki Yoshida said that that Final Fantasy XIV has now surpassed 24 million players. The game is now the most profitable Final Fantasy game in the series; of all time basically.

Yoshida revealed that the game’s player count has hit 24 million players, about 11 years after the game came out back in 2010. FFXIV player count was 4 million registered players back in 2015, with that same number going up to 10 million in 2017. That’s when the third expansion Stormblood came out. That number doubled within the next four years up to now.

The director had this to say:

“It’s perhaps unbecoming of me to say but in terms of our business, we’ve been able to achieve great success. Moving forward, we’re going to spare no expense with our investments to ensure that this game continues to be one which our players can enjoy.

You all know just how hard things were for us with the original Final Fantasy 14. Since then, we were able to transform the title into one that provides a major contribution to our company’s profits.”

Truly this is one of the rare comeback stories in video game history where all’s well that ends well. While we’re on the subject of MMOs, he’s also not a fan of the whole FFXIV vs World of Warcraft debacle that’s going on. On a recent PC Gamer interview, he said people are making too big a scandal out of the recent Blizzard lawsuits and people leaving WoW for FFXIV because of it. He’s happy people are passionate about games, but he is concerned with the mentality that fans of a game have to be completely dedicated to it:

“But I also worry about some of these people getting a little too enthusiastic to the point where they are sort of binding people down, chaining people down and going into the community and almost attacking those people who want to take a break sometimes and maybe enjoy a different game and chain them down in that way.

The hard work we’ve been putting into Final Fantasy 14 did pay off. But this whole conversation about surpassing WoW is the wrong conversation to have and it’s honestly irritating.”

FFXIV: Endwalker will be out the end of November this year and will cap off the game’s current storyline.