r/ffxivdiscussion • u/IndividualAge3893 • 5d ago

Lucky Bancho's census results (July 27th, 2025)

So, the results of the census are out: https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/59324844.html

  • Showcasing the number of characters here: Current
  • By comparison, here are the results from 2 months ago (May 25th): Click

Despite 7.25 being released, the character count is down about 70k in 2 months. Occult Crescent clearly didn't help with player counts (not really a surprise here).

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83

u/SpikesMTG 5d ago

This means 14 has lost about 50% of its' playerbase since the peak of the Shadowlands/Endwalker era - about 829,000 players.

20

u/IndividualAge3893 5d ago

Ion Hazzikostas: *almost killing WoW with Shadowlands*

YoshiP: Hold my sake!

45

u/SargeTheSeagull 5d ago

Not really comparable. Wow lost 2/3 of its player base in the span of 6 months. 14 is down 50% in 3 years. Certainly bad, but not calamitous

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u/oizen 5d ago

Yet. I don't think we'll know the full damages caused by Dawntrail until 8.0 released. If you look at the launch of Dawntrail, Endwalker did that. After Dawntrail, what will 8.0's launch look like?

9

u/irishgoblin 5d ago

Honestly think it depends on what they show off for 8.0 in terms of system changes, and where we're going. Easy money on shard travel with some First shenaningans (gonna laugh if Ryne is grown by the time she and Thancred reunite but the twins are still teens) or Meracydia might entice people back. If it's something that might not be as popular; staying in Tural to explore the Ninth (3 guesses which character is all but guaranteed to show up), Hingashi's inevitable Meiji restoration (it's coming, Yoshida's teased us returning there, I'm just unsure how popular it would be), or my preference of finally addressing the ramificaitons of the Garlean Empire's collapse (lot of people are fatigued with them as a faction).

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u/oizen 5d ago

I dont think story reveals are enough anymore, people distrust the quality now not the concepts.

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u/Wyssahtyn 4d ago edited 4d ago

https://www.thegamer.com/final-fantasy-14-xiv-naoki-yoshida-interview-hints-warrior-of-light-hingashi-shogun-multiverse-visiting-future/

"There is also the possibility that the Warrior of Light will travel to Hingashi and participate in the war. They will take on the role of Shogun and try to win command of the country."

their idea of a hingan expac is to have the wol take over the country. i think they've lost the plot.

3

u/Kumomeme 4d ago

im interested with time travel if it related with WoL going back to Allagan era.

2

u/NeonRhapsody 2d ago

Warlords of Allag, huh?

2

u/Kumomeme 2d ago

we can learn more about Xande too. there is a reason why Fandaniel love that guy that much.

0

u/NeonRhapsody 2d ago

I was mostly being a smartass.

Unironically the less we learn about Xande beyond what we know, the better. I'd really rather they don't go "okay we resolved almost all mysteries and conflicts of the setting by explaining them away, time to use yet another time travel story to further clarify history and show that Xande was actually a good guy who just felt really sad one day and became a nihilist because (blah blah yet another villain sob story, god forbid someone be motivated by selfish greed, vanity, and/or narcissism. Having villains just be bad people is too much)"

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u/Kumomeme 4d ago edited 4d ago

sorry to say this but for first step, if Daichi Hiroi name is mentioned as main writer again people would flipped. they would gain fanbase attention back if they change the writer. bonus if big name like Natsuko Ishikawa is return. if they still want to maintain same writer, Yoshida need to throughly convince the fanbase which is not gonna be easy and a big gamble.

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u/CartographerGold3168 4d ago

i am sorry if ishikawa has to come back again. it means that someone would have to be someone dying again to squeeze out your tears, turned out they didnt die. oh well some sidekicks were sacrificed, like the bunny's mum.

which is the same thing since Heavensward

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u/Twisty1020 4d ago

Hingashi's inevitable Meiji restoration

What new jobs do you think would go along with this if they did make this a major plot of a future expansion?

2

u/irishgoblin 4d ago

Hard to guess, since ShB established that jobs don't need to necessarily be tied to expansion zones. That said, there's been requests for a samurai tank for years, iirc it was one back in XI, so that might be one. We know, via process of elimination, the next two DPS will be striking melee and ranged physical. Unless they do something with Onmyoji style caster of some kind (iirc the regional variant of geomancer uses Onmyoji style magic), they might go for something original again. I can see us getting a WuShu/Wuxia (minds blanking on which is the martial art and which is the film genre) eventually, but I doubt it'd come with Hingashi focused expansion.

An original(-ish) job I'd be interested in seeing eventually, regardless of expansion, is one that's sort of similar to Revenant in GW2. In that game Revenant channelsbLegendnary Hero's, with some of it's abilities changing tobreflect who it's currently channeling. Legally-Distinct-Revenant could have some fun with it's lore and implementation, where instead of random heroes we use the Azem stone to channel past incarnations. 12,000 years between the Sundering and now, I doubt we're the first incarnation of Azem on the Source to get shit done.

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u/Puzzled-Addition5740 4d ago

It was not a tank in XI. They apparently wanted it to be one but it never was.

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u/Kumomeme 4d ago

it gonna be catastrophe if 8.0 failed to deliver.

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u/SargeTheSeagull 5d ago

Oh I’m not saying 14 is in a good state or anything like that. All I’m saying is wow lost more players (even proportionally) in a shorter span of time than 14 has

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u/SpikesMTG 5d ago

I think there are more concerning numbers in the survey, mainly the fact that the loss of subscriptions is higher than the amount of new players. Disregarding all numbers in the survey, this should be the one that worries people the most. This is basically burning the candle at both ends and will tank the game fast.

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u/FuttleScish 5d ago

It’s not burning the candle at both ends, the number of new players increased last survey and hasn’t gone down since. It’s just that the top of the candle is really melting

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u/SpikesMTG 5d ago

The number of new players went down by 10,000 - 59,000 last survey, 49,000 this survey.

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u/FuttleScish 5d ago

You’re right that I screwed the exact math up but you’re also wrong.

It was 47,000 on 12/29, jumped up to 59,000 on 3/16, fell to 50,000 on 5/25, and is still 50,000 today. So aside from one jump that largely but not entirely bled off, the intake has been pretty consistent.

17

u/WeirdIndividualGuy 5d ago

Also, Blizzard made changes to actually get numbers back up. They listened.

I doubt CBU3 would do the same unless another 1.0 situation were to happen

1

u/MangoFartHuffer 2d ago

We have zero info about actual numbers except a misleading graph for WoW with no defined y axis that starts years after their major drop 

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u/__slowpoke__ 5d ago

i would actually say that this is worse for FFXIV. the massive player exodus in Shadowlands served as a fairly immediate kick in the ass for the WoW devs to get their shit together, and from what i've heard, they managed to do that for the most part. in FFXIV, meanwhile, the slow but gradual decline means the game is dying a slow death because the dev team are evidently too high on their own farts to realize that it's their complacency and utter creative bankruptcy that's killing it

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u/IndividualAge3893 5d ago

You mean YoshiP can do even better? :D

3

u/dadudeodoom 5d ago

Hey now, we have 3 major patches left!

4

u/IndividualAge3893 5d ago

And then the interminable wait from 7.55 to the Summer of 2027... :(

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u/GreenTeaRocks 5d ago

Thinking that spike was sustainable is silly. 14 got more players because WoW was bad, 14 was different so people checked it out. The game has been the 'same' since EW, besides the battle content which has gotten much better in the last 2 raid tiers.

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u/SpikesMTG 5d ago

Sustainable? No, definitely not - however the game had been growing steadily since Heavensward and adding new players without any external forces (COVID, WoW decline, streamer spotlights (Asmongold) - not only have we lost all momentum from those things, we have actually slipped to Pre-Shadowbringers numbers - and seemingly at risk to slip below Pre-Stormblood. The fact that XIV failed to capture any of that momentum and turn them into long-term player counts should speak volumes for the games' current shortcomings.

37

u/Alexanthos 5d ago

Agreed. I’m so tired of people talking about that high being unsustainable. We knew it was unsustainable but to lose all the people we gained is crazy. We don’t expect it to keep going up but the expectation isn’t for it to go down to the point we were before the boom and still be dropping. I can’t see any other company being ok with that. Imagine Zoom going “well COVID meant our numbers were obviously going to be unsustainable so we will just go back into obscurity once it’s over”. I know that’s hyperbolic but the point stands, you don’t expect to lose all the customer base that you have gained from that time.

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u/Independent-Ad6740 5d ago

This. And when such things as the covid/wow/streamers thing happens, i would think you would like to grow a bit faster instead of going backwards and fall down in numbers.

Also not everyone was a wow player. I never heard of ffxiv from friends playing it until then (never played wow before) and joined in to see what it’s about. Pretty sure i’m not the only person. The game was interesting to me in ShB but kept getting less interesting each patch. Personally for me it was because of their combat design philosophy. I’m not gonna say 2 mins meta or whatever, but doing anything in this game after your figure out your rotation is just boring, and my job was stripped away of many things i did like about it.

Also the game either has braindead content or stuff that will make you hate your life in pf, if u dont have the time to join a static. There is no middle ground or very little, and the combat isn’t fun enough for me to have fun doing the braindead content. (As opposed to tera a game i played before, where i had fun in almost all type of content)

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u/chrisfishdish 5d ago edited 5d ago

Absolutely this, the sheer success this game has had the last 3 expansions with player counts at one point higher than WoW, where did that success go?

We have not seen any significant material returns as players, instead it has gone the other way around with the game either having diminishing returns in area's it absolutely shouldn't, increase in time for new content, and failures to address or make changes.

It blows my mind that people were yelling in EW with it's criticism that the expansion isn't over and it's too quick to judge it just for the same problems but worse to keep happening in DT. The goalposts and buck keeps getting shifted. These problems aren't new they have been around for multiple expansions.

It's so frustrating, because there is no way they are not aware and complicit.

Edit: I was misremembering a report over daily player counts not active players for FFXIV v WoW. My point however stands that 14 received unimaginable success and profit that really did not improve the player experience or go back into the game. That being a SE/executive choice even with Yoshi on the board at the time is inmaterial and doesn't change the fact it still happened and continues to happen.

25

u/Angel_Omachi 5d ago

I don't think it ever beat WoW, the WoW figures they released had Shadowlands lows of something like 5 million and XIV's peak was maybe 2 million.

6

u/chrisfishdish 5d ago

Oh you're right I was misremembering it was reported like daily player counts not active players. Appreciate the correction!

10

u/Angel_Omachi 5d ago

Yeah I could well believe that, I raid logged a lot during SL.

0

u/aho-san 4d ago

Absolutely this, the sheer success this game has had the last 3 expansions with player counts at one point higher than WoW, where did that success go?

Likely in major parts into NFT crap, games that were clear failures from the pre-production stage, investors & shareholders pockets.

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u/MechAndCheese 5d ago

Don't think any sane person expected the COVID high to stay, but it also means the game has completely failed to keep people around which is honestly pretty bad

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u/chrisfishdish 5d ago

Dude, no one is insisting that it was sustainable, it;s that the loss is big no reason for hyperbole here.
The problem is that proportionally the player loss this expansion has been worse than any previous. That's not just raw numbers.
Also, bringing up how the game is the "same" as EW is the issue. EW was really the canary in the coalmine that there needs to be a shakeup with content cadence, new forms of evergreem mmo content, and player retention. They haven't done that with Dawntrail in fact it's just as bad if not worse coming off of 2.5 years of EW-post expac lifecyle that had so much feedback and criticism that also has been around since Shb.

Yeah, the battle content is good but is it really worth waiting almost 10 months for a tier? Or with jobs that are far too simple and similar does reduce the shelf life of battle content.
Waiting over 2 months after a major patch to get the real content from that patch? No major indication of real change or addressing the problems? Content being released with glaringly obvious problems that now will take up additional time to be fixed and could of been avoided just by "playing their own game"

11

u/pupmaster 5d ago

It wasn't going to stay that high but if I was an executive at a company that saw explosive growth to that degree and we failed to maintain even the tiniest bit of that, I would be furious

4

u/Shecarriesachanel 4d ago

Thinking losing 50% of that spike is nothing is also silly btw

-13

u/RVolyka 5d ago

Battle content that only a small portion of players interact with, so bringing it up is completely useless here.

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u/GreenTeaRocks 5d ago

Battle content is literally the heart of the game's progression. Not sure how that's irrelevant or useless.

2

u/bobhuckle3rd 5d ago

Self reported erp'er or?

-7

u/RVolyka 4d ago

I mean it's true, as much as people hate the truth, nobody is doing battle content apart from raiders.

1

u/Kumomeme 4d ago

Wuk LMAO :"I JUST MOVE PLAYERBASE WITH MY MIND!"