Cash shop confirmed

[Alukah]

Why all this hyper moaning about Vanity crap for sale that you dont even NEED?????? It boggles the Miiiiiiiiiiiiind!!

Because for many people vanity is as, if not more important than a piece of gear that gets outdated in 3 months. It boggles the Miiiiiiiiiiiiind!!

What's with the dissing on vanity when it's the only thing that never gets outdated and can be reused many times? Is it that hard to understand that everyone enjoys different aspects of the game? That not everyone gets their epeen hard with better gear and that a lot of people enjoy content outside the endless gear treadmill?

Anything that is not related to the end game raid can be added to the cash shop under the excuse that it doesn't affect progression, but progression hardly matters when the rest of the game can be moved behind a cash wall.

[Dwill]

The fact that they produced a bad product and had to suffer the financial consequences is not the fault of the playerbase nor is it our responsibility to bail them out of it.

While I agree that it isn't the fault of the playerbase they suffered a huge financial blow, they can't recover from it with just good will by cutting a potential revenue source just because certain people do not like it. Money has to come from somewhere and if the subscription fees are not enough for whatever reason, they have to find another potential revenue source.

In the end, this is not something that is forced on you. You either support it by buying from it or you don't by not buying from it.

WoW doesn't have items in the cash shop that impact gameplay? Well, WoW players will be surprised to hear that those were just figments of their imagination!

Yeah, that experience booster gives you such a huge advantage. That same booster that was marketed toward returning players so they could get ready to play with their friends for the new expansion and not your average endgame players who's already rocking between 2-4 alt and cost a steep 60$ to which Blizzard already admitted they could have made more money from it but decide not to.It was also introduced as a QoL of change for people that were already buying multiple copies of the game for the Refer-a-Friend experience bonuses. The same booster that gives horrible gear and pathetic amount of money to start with it.

Yeah man, that advantage.

[Amberion]

While I agree that it isn't the fault of the playerbase they suffered a huge financial blow, they can't recover from it with just good will by cutting a potential revenue source just because certain people do not like it. Money has to come from somewhere and if the subscription fees are not enough for whatever reason, they have to find another potential revenue source.

Didn't FFXIV: ARR bring them up from the red in their accounts?

Also, let's not forget their biggest cash hit so far, it never had a cash shop.

[Fyrebrand]

Then simply don't buy anything at the cash shop, that's all there's to it. That way you don't have to pay for their mistake .

Except, the devs can only make so much content. Let's call the total amount of content they create X. The amount of content which is in the cash shop, we'll call Y. Y is a subset of X.

Before the cash shop, the amount of content my sub got me was X.

After cash shop, the amount of content my sub gets me will be X minus Y.

It's really very simple to understand -- even if I totally ignore the cash shop, my experience of the game is being drained and damaged. And please don't tell me that X will magically become bigger to accommodate for Y, or that Y is not actually taken from X. I would have a hard time coming up with something more naive than that.

[Negotiator]

i've stated earlier that at 2.5mil subscriptions, they take in $250mil - 375mil a month. I can't understand how people want to spend more money on things, worthless or not to them, SHOULD be in the game that we are already paying a subscription for.

[Vhailor]

I would like to throw in my two cents, here.

I haven't read all of this thread, obviously, but the 10 or so pages of comments I have read (the first few, and random selections of others) highlight the fact that some people feel bothered for (generally vague) reasons, while other people are not because they hold the view that the cash shop doesn't affect us unless we choose to use it.

I am here to argue that it does, in fact, affect us. It affects all of us, as does every mechanism SE implements in the name of accessibility - from a Duty Finder to monsters not having a set claim, from the cash shop to the relatively simplistic combat system, from the Echo to the steady inflation of iLevels.

The push towards accessibility, and broad appeal, affects us all, not because it eats development time that might otherwise be spent on other types of content, but because it determines the community that will ultimately be playing FFXIV. We commonly forget that this is a vital aspect of MMOs. I chose to play FFXI for roughly 10 years because of the community, not the game. I chose it over World of Warcraft because the general player was smarter, more mature, more skilled, more pleasant to interact with. This isn't to say it was perfect, not by any means - but it was a vast improvement. FFXIV, unfortunately, does not feel this way.

So, yes, the cash shop, for me, is playing the role of the last straw - the straw that will prevent me from giving XIV another chance. Which is a shame, because I was getting excited for Heavensward. It's not the last straw because it affects me directly, or because it somehow diminishes my enjoyment of the game. It's not the last straw for me because I'm worried about what it will become.

It's the last straw for me because I don't want to spend my time within the community that SE has courted, and clearly is going to continue courting.

Note that I certainly don't begrudge SE for making a business decision - lord knows that Blizzard has made several fortunes by following a similar business plan. Appealing to the lowest common denominator can definitely broaden a customer base. That said, just as the state of the average customer is, on its own, sufficient to keep me out of a Walmart, so too the average player of XIV is sufficient to keep me unsubscribed.

Anyway, those are my feelings. I suspect most people uncomfortable with the idea of a cash shop are having similar views, though the various arguments that I've run across don't seem to get to the heart of the matter. To each their own, however - for those of you who continue to enjoy FFXIV, by all means, continue doing so.

[Krr]

dota 2, LoL, WoW. 3 for you

Yeah those runes, rune pages, and the ability to expand my hero selection pool faster than a customer who doesn't sink real $$$ into the cash shop every month definitely don't impact the gameplay of League of Legends, a MOBA that has a pre-game metagame based on the ability to ban, pick and counterpick heroes.

[Dwill]

Didn't FFXIV: ARR bring them up from the red in their accounts?

Also, let's not forget their biggest cash hit so far, it never had a cash shop.

Not saying it didn't but any accountant worth their salt will tell you to diversify your revenue sources and if you have but one thing that is bringing you money, make sure to get the most out of it. When a company is in the red, it usually puts a hold on certain project's development or even flat out cancel them to bring back their net income to a positive value, which I'm pretty sure they did to a degree (conjecture here, I may be wrong since I am speaking only from experience). The hype for FFXIV: ARR sure brought a good amount of revenue to Square Enix but the game alone won't sustain a company like them on itself for very long so until they develop/release other source of revenues (FFXV, KH2, etc), they need a bigger amount of money, especially wit the game's growth being more stable which allows the army of accountant at their HQ to actually budget their next fiscal year.

Yeah those runes, rune pages, and the ability to expand my hero selection pool faster than a customer who doesn't sink real $$$ into the cash shop every month definitely don't impact the gameplay of League of Legends, a MOBA that has a pre-game metagame based on the ability to ban, pick and counterpick heroes.

Which is why to play in ranked mode, you need at least 16 champions outside of the free weeks one to even play there. 16 of them is not hard to obtain by level 30 while havng a rune page for 2 roles at the very least.

[Krr]

Remember all those times people kept rebuying copies of the game or related mechandise to get exclusive in-game goodies? Hmm, it's almost as if you already had to pay real cash for some cosmetics you couldn't get anywhere else, and that this was a standard part of the game's business model.

[Tupsi]

I think the weirdest thing about this is people are pissed at a Business wanting to make money. Here's a popular argument:

"I should be able to obtain everything in game, I pay a sub fee."

Answer This: Where the hell is my Wind Up Bahamut? My Veteran Reward Minions and Mounts and Barding without needing to sub for a year (over $100 paid) and instead obtainable via quest? My Mog Cap? My Coeurl Mount? My Wind Up Dalamud? Where are these in-game without "using real money"?

The funny thig is? Someone will argue against that despite using that exact argument to argue against the cash shop.