Final Fantasy 14’splayer numbers havebeen dropping pretty steadily ever since the beginning of Dawntrail, that there’s no denying. Due to a number of problems, including a lackluster story, long development time between patches, and lack of polish, people have had little reason to keep their subscriptions going, instead choosing topass the time on other titles like Final Fantasy 11.
Patch 7.25 was billed as the patch to fix all of that though, bringing in major content drops like Occult Crescent and the long-awaited relic weapon grind. It was claimed by many that the Occult Crescent would be the one thing to satiate the game’s midcore audience, bring at least a few people back into the fold, and help plateau the game’s declining player numbers.
Final Fantasy 14’s Player Count Is Still Dropping Following Patch 7.25
Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to have been the case,as Lucky Bancho’s census results(shared by Reddit user IndividualAge3893) heading into Patch 7.3 next month don’t paint a pretty picture. According to these results, the number of active characters currently playing Final Fantasy 14 is currently at 880,000, which is 70,000 players lower than the last census.
On top of that, the number of returning characters is down by 30,000, the number of continuing active characters is down by 40,000, while the number of new characters is roughly 50,000, which is the same as the last census. All of this essentially says that the Occult Crescent hasn’t done much to convince people to stick around, and done very little to convince people to return.
There are a number of reasons for this, one of the major ones being the initial reception to Occult Crescent being fairly hostile thanks to what players dubbed “island gacha”.Getting into the Forked Tower ended up being such a major painthat it forced Yoshi-P to dedicate a portion of Patch 7.3’s live letter to addressing feedback,and Occult Crescent itself now has a reputation for being a major fumble.
It’s also worth noting that these numbers aren’t wholly accurate, as Lucky Bancho uses achievement data to determine whether an account is active or not, but they’re generally regarded as pretty reliable. Even if the numbers aren’t specifically accurate, player numbers are still dropping, the well of new players is drying up, and not much is going to change for a while.
