What does FF14 have next to sub:
-RL items with ingame rewards to make more people buy it
- A app with most of its useful features behind a monthly paywall and on top of that will start to use coins that you can buy for rl too.
- A cash shop that was once just there to give people a chance to get old event items and that gets more and more exclusive stuff in it
- monthly retainer fees and no new retainer for a while, in a game with huge amount of glamour and crafting mats
- jump potions to reach certain levels
Honestly I dont feel much difference to this than games like Black desert. In Black desert you only have to pay once to buy the game and are at least not forced to buy anything from that. You get advantages if you do but honestly this is a F2P game if you bought it once so they at least need to have some kind of way to earn money. FF14 has a sub, yet still sells us quite some stuff as a cash shop and puts inventory space behind retainers and now even an app. In Black desert one could also buy parts of an outfit which made it cheaper.
Then lets compare FF14 to another sub MMO: Wow did have the cash shop for more years, yet way less items in it then FF14. Some parts might be more expensive on it but lets not forget that you can buy this ingame too if you have enough money in the game so if you are good at farming this you might not even need to pay one dollar of rl money to sub. And like others have stated, the app they have or had was much bigger and still completely free.
So in my view it does not look good for SEs cash shop.
