Just before Final Fantasy XIV’s new patch 7.25 went live on May 27, LuckyBancho, a player who’s been running an unofficial FFXIV census since the game’s release, released a new analysis of player trends. According to their observations, Final Fantasy XIV has seen active character counts decrease in the past two months (since the release of patch 7.2), and this decline is part of a continuous downwards trend they have been tracking since the release of the Dawntrail expansion in June 2024.
Before going into the details, it’s important to note that this analysis is based on unofficial active characters counts, not player counts. LuckyBancho’s criteria for determining active characters includes characters above level 70 who have shown changes in parameters such as experience points, HP, level, etc. since the previous survey. This is meant to filter out inactive or bot accounts, but as the method may not capture the full scope of the player base, the figures should be taken with a grain of salt. Additionally, all of the survey data is sourced from the data available on The Lodestone in the past two months. The data is then summarized and compared to the previous FFXIV census analysis published in March 2025.
One of the biggest takeaways put forward is that, ever since the release of Dawntrail, the population of FFXIV has been steadily declining, and this decline is yet to bottom out. Just in the last two months, active character count dropped from approximately 990,000 to around 950,000.
Moreover, the number of newly created characters compared to the March survey has dropped from approximately 59,000 to around 50,000. There are also around 20,000 less returning characters (inactive characters that turned active) compared to the previous survey (from 170,000 to 150,000). The same goes for the number of characters who have been continuously active since March, dropping by approximately 20,000.
But that’s only the shift from the past two months. Illustrating the long-term decline since Dawntrail’s release, LuckyBancho also presented a graph that, according to them represents the shift in players a bit more accurately – it is based on the characters’ achievements. The graph includes FFXIV’s quarterly data from Q4 of 2011. The number of characters with their first achievement recorded during each period (i.e., newcomers) is represented with blue, the number of characters who haven’t had any achievements confirmed after that specific period (i.e. became inactive), is green while the number of characters who have had any other achievements recorded during that period (continued to be active) is red.
The second quarter of 2025 hasn’t ended yet, and there are still updates to be made to the graph, but LuckyBancho suggests that, while there is a possibility for the player base to grow with the new update, the downward trend will most likely continue, as the number of inactive characters is growing and there are less and less new characters being registered.
They speculate that the content of the game, which released to mixed feedback, is the reason why so many players are leaving, as even with major updates people are still dropping the game. While the content of the new 7.2 patch has had good reception so far, they believe it still may not be enough to make old players want to come back.
