Unofficial Census 2016 for FFXIV

[Kaurie]

Yeah, the game is fine. These numbers show what I see in the game -- a healthy playerbase. I'm not at all surprised.

Hm, you and I read these numbers very differently. I see that we're down to 507,000 characters (so sub 507,000 players) from 639,000 only 4 months ago, and 824,000 almost 1 year ago. This shows a pretty steady decline.

11-08-2016 507,000
20-04-2016 639,000
09-01-2016 771,000
09-08-2015 824,000
19-04-2015 730,000
24-12-2014 574,000
16-09-2014 650,000

Then looking at my server, there are a total of only 4,000 people who have completed the 3.0 story and 2.5k who have caught up fully in the story. As you need the story unlocked to access things like the new expert dungeon + nidhogg, that shows a pretty small pool of players on my server who have access to that.

All of that said, I think there is some reasoning behind this. Most notably, we are rather far into the expansion at this time. I think that is the general pattern associated with expansions - where it starts off high and gradually decreases throughout the expansion. Then there is also some competition from other games (i.e. Legion launching soon, GW2 had an expansion some months back, other MMO's launched like BDO, Blade and Soul etc.)

Ty for posting this. The numbers match what I thought of the state of the game. There is a drop in active characters now that we are nearing the end of an expansion. The numbers will probably shoot up before the next expansion like they usually do for MMOs. Still quite healthy numbers and nowhere near the death of this game.

I am not sure if I'd say we are near the 'end of the expansion'. From the announcement of Heavensward to launch was 8 months, and we don't have an announcement of a new expansion yet. With this information, we can expect that we have roughly at least 8 months more - we're 14 months in. So, we're 14/22(or greater) meaning we're more than likely less than 64% of the way through the expansion. I'd call that mid not end, personally. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.

[Ibi]

I am not sure if I'd say we are near the 'end of the expansion'. From the announcement of Heavensward to launch was 8 months, and we don't have an announcement of a new expansion yet. With this information, we can expect that we have roughly at least 8 months more - we're 14 months in. So, we're 14/22(or greater) meaning we're more than likely less than 64% of the way through the expansion. I'd call that mid not end, personally. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.

This seems very reasonable.

We know we're getting patch 3.4 before Fanfest (per this interview) and then the expansion announcement at the NA Fanfest in October.

We also know that Heavensward was originally planned to be a Spring launch, and though the end of June technically qualifies, we know it was later than they planned.

In terms of the calendar, we're about a month ahead of where we were in the 2.x patch cycle: 2.3 and 2.4 were early July and late October respectively, 3.3 was early June and 3.4 will probably be late September. Assuming things proceed in roughly the same manner (and given everything that's happened so far in 3.x, it's a reasonable guess that they will), our best estimate for the next expansion would be some time near the end of May.

That would give Heavensward a total life span of 22.3 months, with us currently at 13.8 months through (61.8%).

Even without looking at actual dates, we can guess that we're roughly half way through the fourth of the (likely) six patches of the expansion (58.3%).

[Stormrider]

Since SE have been fibbbing about 3 months using 16 weeks instead. A16 week cycle between 3.1 and 3.2 and 16 weeks for 3.3 puts 3.4 Sept 27 or Oct 4. Then the question is a 3.5 if we get a 3.5 that would be Jan then a spring launch closer to 24 months. That is a lot of time left and what people feel is pretty low point now. I doubt we are getting another ninja to bump subs up.

500k is healthy and people don't quite seem to value the gaming dollar the same as others, so cash shop makes up for lost subs and also doesn't cost them a lot bandwidth. Years ago I had seen an article about MMO costs and why 10 dollars has to be the minimum due to bandwidth and server costs before any actual game play is developed. How that has changed I am not sure most MMOs don't really talk about costs or gaming sites aren't interested in the costs to run one.