Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
It's Steam accounts only, and it's going off of the "peak" number of logins, meaning the single highest (and most anomalous) data point. If you look at the average daily logins per month, you'll see that DT is in virtually the same exact place ShB was, and significantly better than EW. At the 8-month mark, DT has seen its average Steam login drop by 40%, compared to 39% for ShB and 49% for EW. Basically, they're cherry-picking numbers to suit their agenda because the more accurate data shows nothing out of the ordinary is actually occurring.
No.

Every expansion saw growth between x.0 and pre-x.1 censuses.

SB 663k -> 830k
ShB 943k -> 1.2m
EW 1.3m -> 1.7m
DT 1.4m -> 1.1m

In terms of player retention (x.0 peak numbers vs x.1 peak numbers), every patch saw about 45% of initial playerbase returning to x.1 patch, but in case of DT, only 39% returned for 6.1.

|| || |pre x.1| post x.1|Result|
|DT |-290k | -147k |-437k|
|EW|+354k| -369k |-14k|
|ShB |+242k| -221k |+20k|
|SB|+167k| -5k |+162k|

It is likely FFXIV will fall under 1 million active players soon, going under pre-Shadowbringers level.

Comparison data from WaltzForLilly
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...low-1-million/

...And claiming cherry picking is legitimately insane because Lucky Bancho is notorious for cherry picking numbers that are favourable for SE. These Dt numbers were taken during a free login campaign, for example.