FF14 player count reached the lowest point in 4 years. We lost 75% of the playerbase.

[DPZ2]

Occam's razor.

Through Occam's Razor, increased sales over 3 quarters from a previous year should indicate the company is making more money this year than last. Since money earned through subscriptions is a good chunk of those profits, a significant downturn in the playerbase should result in a decided drop in those profits.

Your 'average players' still says nothing about the actual number of subscribers.

There are problems with the Lucky Bancho report. The biggest is that it drops players leveling from 1 through 70 because it cannot discern between free to play and paying subscribers. The second biggest is that it does not report on subscriptions, because those numbers are not present. The third biggest is that it inflates the number of active players based on the number of characters in the game, not the number of accounts paying a subscription. Go ask the alt-aholic contingent whether they have more than 1 character on their account.

The only report I've read recently indicates a drop from 1.4 million characters to about 1.03 million characters in the latest report, decidedly not anywhere near the click-bait of 75%.

If the argument is that Steam Chart numbers drop off between patches, or that that 95k concurrent player mark will never be reached again (that occurred one month before Endwalker released, mind you), or that the release of other games is as likely to attract a Steam player as this one, you've got my acknowledgement.

The use of terms like 'crater' and 'catastrophic' do not yet apply.