Summary
- Final Fantasy 14 has seen a rather large drop in players between the release of Dawntrail and Patch 7.1.
- Lucky Bancho has claimed that over 1.4 million players were active during the release of Dawntrail, though numbers currently sit at just 1.03 million.
- On that current trajectory, Final Fantasy 14 will likely fall below 1 million active players, with very little content getting more casual players to stick around.
Final Fantasy 14 is in a pretty odd spot at the moment. A lot of people are still kind of disappointed with the story, even after Patch 7.1’s attempts to try and spice things up a bit, and a lot of complaints right now are generally being leveled at the lack of things to do.
New content like the World of Darkness Chaotic Raid and Echoes of Vana’Diel Alliance Raid are pretty cool, with a level of difficulty that players find refreshing, but there aren’t any long-term grinds that are really enticing more casual players to stick around.
Final Fantasy 14 Is Seeing A Large Player Drop Following Dawntrail
In fact, there’s so little to do right now that Final Fantasy 14 is experiencing quite a large drop in active players. A Japanese blog site called Lucky Bancho (shared by Reddit user Impressive_Wafer_287), that tracks player numbers for Final Fantasy 14 across various expansions and patches, has revealed that Dawntrail actually lost a significant number of players between Patch 7.0 and Patch 7.1, whereas other expansions actually grew in players.
According to Lucky Bancho, over 1.4 million players were active upon the release of Dawntrail, while just 1.1 million were active upon the release of Patch 7.1. In comparison, Shadowbringers and Endwalker had 943,000 and 1.3 million players upon each expansion’s launch, which then rose to 1.2 million and 1.7 million upon the release of patches 5.1 and 6.1 respectively.
It’s also claimed by Lucky Bancho that players are still dropping rather quickly after Patch 7.1, with the active player count going from 1.15 million to about 1.03 million. On that current trajectory, Final Fantasy 14 seems poised to drop below 1 million active players for the first time in a good long while, which should be raising alarm bells for Square Enix, considering Final Fantasy 14 is the game that is propping up the entire company.
Of course, a drop-off in players is always expected after a large expansion, but Dawntrail’s numbers are slightly worrying. It doesn’t help that most of the content released after Dawntrail has been catered towards high-end raiders, with very little for more casual players to spend time on. That should change once the relic grind, field operation, and new deep dungeon are eventually released, but as it stands right now, Final Fantasy 14 isn’t tempting players enough to stick around.
