Anyone seen the numbers in terms of sales and player numbers?

@TigerAlen410 If you'll allow me to answer your question with another question...

The player numbers dropped by about 600,000 from F1 21 to F1 23.  F1 23 came out while F1 24 was being developed.  So, EA knew how much the player count had dropped WHILE F1 24 was being worked on.

Do you think if EA was concerned about the player count drop, they would have made sure that F1 24 was a good enough product to get those 600,000 players back? 

I think if they cared about player count drop, they would have made very sure that F1 24 was good enough to get those players back.  But F1 24 clearly was not given enough time or attention to be good enough to do that.

Corporations are about hitting yearly profit targets.  If the target is hit, then anything else past that is just money in pocket and (sometimes) gets given back to employees as end of year compensation.  It seems to me like they've still been hitting those yearly targets, otherwise they'd be re-thinking their development and project strategy.  And to be honest, that may be happening.  But we'll never know.

Granted - F1 24 has been on sale pretty much constantly since launch.  This to me says that this year's numbers may not be hitting their planned target for the 2024 fiscal year, and they're trying to get people to buy it on a discount so the monetary gap gets filled before EOY earnings calls (the fiscal year closes out in a couple weeks). 

So, to answer your original question - I think the fact that this game is on sale non-stop tells me that someone somewhere in EA may finally be getting worried about the returns they're getting (or not getting) on this franchise.  Will it change how they handle future installments?  Who knows.  But based on how EA has handled FIFA/FC, Madden, etc. I'm not holding my breath.

@TigerAlen410 Yes & no, regarding that chart I think it's important to consider a lot of that peak in sales was unsustainable. Covid keeping people inside and the DTS boom certainly played a big part in the massive jump in sales of 2020. Comparing F1 24 to 2019 the numbers are still not good, but not nearly as dire.

Also worth noting that microtransactions were not in the game in 2019 and there was not a "champions edition" available to purchase. I don't know what the numbers are but depending on how much people have spent on MTX there's a path to making more money from fewer game sales. 

While most of us here on the forums are not pleased with the direction the franchise is headed, I'm sure EA has crunched the numbers enough to know what's profitable.