Steam, LB and Quarterly Estimate Chart

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

The data is effectively as I predicted.

A whole whirlwind of circumstances around EW's launch along with it being the huge ending to the 10 year saga gave it such a huge hype that DT just wasn't going to be able to match, but DT still had a respective showing at about 85% the player rate as EW's launch. 7.1 vs 6.1's numbers will be the interesting comparison though.

Might wanna explain what the data is actually made up of and trying to show.

Are they purchases made of the game?
Are they active players?
What criteria is being used to exclude and mitigate bad data? (E.g. bots)

Just because all I can see from it is consistent growth up until dawntrail breaks the pattern unless I'm misunderstanding something?

Bancho's data filters out:
-all free trial players (Anyone who's max level is no higher than 70 on any job, (which also technically filters out "new" players at the same time, but they'll be a minority on this front) Coincidentally, this also filters out the vast majority of RMT bots since they simply use the base game since level 50 is all they need due to ARR dungeons dropping gil, though some more sophisticated higher level bots may get included into this figure, they'll also be a very small minority.
-Any character who's attributes haven't changed since the last census (so no job changing, no gear upgrades, nothing that would change anything in about a 4 month period, so the only characters grabbed are actually 'active' in some way)

There may be a small minority of the characters who are high-leveled raid bots or RP characters or just plain alts, but the majority of the characters the Census tracks with the criteria are actually active players.

And yes, the game has had continued active growth until EW, though that growth was unsustainable given the whirlwind of things going for it, so a dip in DT was expected.

TLDR, game took a minor hit, but its far from dead. Still completely shatter SHB's numbers which were considered successful by Square-Enix. DT is still continuing the trend of being a cash cow for SE.

[AnnRam]

Even if you have 100000000000000000000000000 people logged in, those aren't "players" because queues at level 100 are still in between 10-15 minutes on Crystal as DPS/Healer w.e

Basically, this game isn't even used as a MMORPG anymore and you know exactly why.