Think it is just desperation. Not sure what the number of players are now, but even at the peak it had to only be a fraction of what they wanted/needed. Since day one they've been trying to squeeze blood from a stone and they're not going to stop trying even though they probably should. 2019 was going to be a slow year for Bethesda so this was going to be their "live service" game to supplement only putting out, what 3 games this year? They keep throwing out cash grab solutions without thinking things through when the problems with 76 run so deep it needs a major overhall.
The player count is really, really low right now. I checked out the Battle Royale mode for a week or two and it's super common to start recognizing names after a day or two. If I had to guess, I'd put that mode at ~400 players on PS4.
Adventure mode was almost "private server mode" because it was frequently empty - to a point where they turned that mode off. "Rumor" is that the old Adventure mode servers are what they're now selling as the private servers, but maybe ~100 people played adventure on PS4.
The regular game mode is harder to gauge just because rooms are often half empty - but there's no telling if that's because of people not playing or just raw matchmaking incompetence. It's harder to recognize names as well, but just because you rarely if ever interact with anyone playing unless you absolutely need to. You might run into another player at a vendor/camp once every few hours.
I'd suggest that on the PS4 they're probably south of 10,000 players and I'd suggest squarely by marketshare that PS4 is the largest platform for FO76 by a wide margin.
Is the game any better than it was a year ago? i got a rare item drop the first week it came out but decided to wait a year to replay it. the first 24 hours of the game I never seen so many people leave.
You could actually make a pretty strong argument that the game is worse now than it was at launch - primarily because so much of the game is "solved". At least when the game was new, most people didn't know what to do and hadn't found all of the secrets and so on.
Now most high level players have tons upon tons of very powerful items that sit for very few caps on vendors just because of how little there is do in the game. Plans are listed for free or at 5% of their cost, mutations are frequently ~200 caps, most legendary weapons are scrapped and so on.
There are a ton of really bad (and really basic) mistakes that Bethesda made when designing FO76 - the cap limit, the stash limit, and the scrap limit. None of these were felt really hard early on, but now they just kind of ruin anything in the game you could politely call an economy, making there even less to do now than there was before.
