Yoshida, The Creator: Savage is the worst tuning ever in an MMO

[Kyne_Lyons]

Raiding is and always has been a niche activity.

Yoshida: First, for normal, the number of players clearing is far more than we expected, which is really good. As of late October, at least about 50% of players who are actively playing battle classes have completed all four parts of normal Alexander Gordias.

Source

This is Normal mode. Only 50% of the playerbase will even go to normal mode, which in Midas was extremely easy.

do they have the money to invest to make a content only for 5% of the player base? something this big for only 5% of the community?

They re-use all the music, art assets, and actually expensive aspects of creating new content from Normal Mode in Savage Mode. It doesn't cost a million dollars to add another phase to a boss. Once all of that content is made for Normal mode, it costs pennies to spend time expanding fights for Savage Mode. Using World of Warcraft as an example, their developers said that 95% of the cost of content development is used creating Normal Mode, and Mythic only costs that 5% since all they're doing is paying people to tune the fights to be harder. 5% of the cost for 5% of the playerbase sounds about right.