You misunderstand me. I am under no delusion that Square should publish any of that information. I'm simply saying that there's no reason to believe the claim that they're re-investing mog station money directly into the game.
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That's not how the burden of proof works. Don't get me wrong, I don't give two damns about the mog station one way or the other, but unless it can be shown to be true, the claim that they re-invest all their mog station money into the game will remain unproven. People just take it on faith that when they were told that is the case, that it is true.
MMO Subscriptions have never gone above 15/month in about 22 years. If you think developers are really getting by just on that and the base entry / expansion costs, you're sorely mistaken.
Some back of the envelope calculations on my part
Assuming:
1. Squenix reporting of 24 mil accounts as of Oct 21 is both accurate and each is a distinct subscription
2. Each of these is paying a 30 day standard sub in my region at 8.99/month
Thats ~2 billion (2,000,000,000) gross annually, not including Mogstation transactions or upfront expansions payments.
I don't claim to be an expert on MMO maintenance costs, but that seems like plenty of income to me.
I dunno, I was doing some googling, and it looks like more recent estimates have total number of subscribers at over 30 mil.
I was going to quote them, but most seems to be pulling that figure from here:
https://mmo-population.com/r/ffxiv