Summary
Final Fantasy 14has an air of doom and gloom around it at the moment, despite all thepromised content like Occult Crescent and Cosmic Explorationcoming in the Patch 7.2 series. It’s no secret that player numbers have been dropping ever since the launch of Dawntrail, and while only Square Enix will have precise data, a tracking blog called Lucky Bancho recently claimed that the number of active player characters is dropping steadily.
Lucky Bancho uses player achievement statistics to see whether player characters are active or not. If they aren’t, we can probably take that as an indicator that the person behind that character has stopped playing. In January, Lucky Bancho revealed that the game’s active character count wasthreatening to drop below 1 million for the first time in nearly four years.
Well, that day seems to have finally come,as Lucky Bancho has released some new statisticswhich reveal that Final Fantasy 14’s active character count is now down to 990,000 from just over one million, with 830,000 of those being characters that have reached Dawntrail. That puts the active player count at around the same level as mid-Shadowbringers, but before the Covid-era boom.
Why Is Final Fantasy 14’s Player Count Dropping?
While these numbers are certainly an indicator that there’s dissatisfaction with Final Fantasy 14, they don’t really paint a picture that the end is nigh.There was always going to be a significant dropoff after Endwalker, with the game’s story having reached a satisfying conclusion, and the relative disappointment with Dawntrail was always going to convince fewer people to come back.
It’s also worth noting that Final Fantasy 14 will likely never reach Endwalker numbers again, what with the perfect storm of Covid-era lockdowns and dissatisfaction with World of Warcraft (also known as the WoW exodus in the community) driving players to the game more than ever. That being said, there are clearly issues with Final Fantasy 14, whether it be the current direction of the story, lack of content, or the repetitive patch cycle.
Patch 7.2 will most likely bring a lot of people back, possibly bumping figures over 1 million again - especially once the bigger content patches that contain relic weapons and activities like Occult Crescent actually drop - but it’s also fair to be slightly concerned. People are crying out for a shake-up of the game’s formula, and if we’re still seeing numbers drop in a few years and after the next expansion, the argument that the game needs one will become stronger.
