Cash shop confirmed

[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.