Chinese costumes are out on Mogstation

[Loggos]

Oh boy, I have been on a writing spree. I'm just very passionate about this topic. Now if university essays wrote themselves that easily...the dream...more time to play.
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I am also on the cash critical side here because in all seriousness I would like to see a financial justification for it. If SE was suffering greatly to keep FFXIV up and the subs were just not cutting it then I could understand the cash shop. So far I have not come across anything that proves this to be the case though so it seems like mere generation of a lot of sweet extra money with little effort and compensation on the player's side that does not come close to the benefit SE draws from this.


The reason this sits so unwell with me is because that there is no substantial value behind those items.
Every value and every exclusivity is assigned to them, i.e. whether it is valuable or not is decided by SE alone (as opposed to rare materials, high real life production costs, etc.) even though it does not necessarily hold such a value.
It is for that reason very difficult to assign a proper price to a virtual item (but that should not mean in turn that every price is acceptable).

Now before you say "but such an item requires development time" then I would say that this does still not justify the price because look at it like this:
The financial effort to create this good is limited to the designing, modelling and coding of the item once.
After that you can reproduce it endlessly without any material cost. You put in the work once but you can get unlimited copies out of it with the press of a button without evening out any further production that you normally would have to pay continuously if you plan to sell a real life item on a regular basis.
Because of this, given the world wide player base the development price can be regained quite quickly.
Another thing is, that despite certain development time items are still not priced accordingly, but again simply by the value SE wants the item to be seen with. The best example is honestly the game itself.
If you buy the collector's edition you paid, what, 50 euros for the original game? (It's such a long time ago, already. I don't quite remember.) You then of course pay subs for servers and patches but given that offline titles often range in the same dimensions it is not unreasonable to assume that this could be the price for the development of the original game - or at least a significant part of it. It is also quite obvious that the developent that goes into the whole game exceeds the creation of a simple dress by far, yet the dress costs between a fourth and a fifth of the price of the whole game (13.50 euros for EU players).
Even if the game price did not cover the whole game but, say, just the creation of Gridania and everything else is subs, there'd probably still be much more development involved in that than compared to the dress.
I think this shows how any value assigned to a glamour item is pure politics and an arbitrary practise of assigning exclusivity. This is why I'm not really convinced of arguments like "this is an acceptable price". This cannot easily be measured. There is maybe no "acceptable price", there may just be the price that we buy or reject it for which is a mixture of everyone's personal threshold and SE's pricing.

As much as I do not judge people who buy the dress as much are people justified to be angered by the price and consider it too high. I mean, heck, you could buy a real piece of clothing for that already.
I do however agree with the sentiment that this is bad business practise on the side of SE because it seems relatively evident to me that they just use this as a formidable opportunity to milk a cash cow without returning the real profit they make back to the game - or at least a significant part of that profit.


Ideally I would also like to have every content covered by my sub because I want to play content for items and earn them. That would be my favourite solution. I could settle with certain alternatives, e.g. they put it in the cash shop AND the game path or simply holding prices very low in the 1-5 euro range (that is what I am personally prepared to pay for such items).

On a side note: I know that there are some people who will buy glamour items that I consider highly overpriced and will provide SE with the customer feedback that they can keep on doing this. But that doesn't mean that everyone in the community agrees with the cash shop model, and neither does it mean that those who like to have cash shop items also endorses the "buy all at all costs" mentality. To basically say "you wanted this, now any criticism as to how it has been handled is obsolete" is not convincing, for reasons that others have already stated before me.