Stop Making Should-Be Achievement Gear.."Optional Gear"

[Alleo]

They tripled FF14's budget for SB. For that to happen, the development teams had sufficient financial data to convince the corporate side of things that the investment was worth it. We are getting a lot system wise. I seriously doubt FF14's sub numbers have increased to the point that would justify it otherwise. Upgrades and moves like that aren't cheap and they are on top of the usual development costs.

This is the reality. If we want more for FF14, the games earnings have to be high enough to justify it. That means either A) a lot more players, B) a higher sub fee or C) additional revenue streams.

But doesnt that mean that the game itself is not running that well if it needs cash shop on top of the sub to get a bigger budget or to get new servers? I mean isnt that kinda scary? What if people will stop buying things from the cash shop? Will we never ever get an server upgrade again? Will we get less content in the expansion after SB if the cash shop is worse than now? A subscription MMO needing the cash shop to survive would imo mean that they dont have enough sub numbers..which would mean that it would be not profitable if they will stop putting things in the cash shop..more and more things in the cash shop could also at the same time mean that sub numbers will drop -> need more items in the cash shop to make up for this.

SE is a really big company and FF14 1.0 really went bad thus I can imagine that SE itself did not want to give the devs a really nice budget to work with..just in case that ARR and HW would be a failure too. I just believe that they finally are believing that this game will do good and are reinvesting the money into it. I also cant see how a budget can be tripled just by cash shop. That would be one hell of sold items.

I really don't think you should be comparing Wildstar to FFXIV here. FFXIV has proven itself to be much more successful. Why would you want a successful MMO to emulate a comparatively unsuccessful one?

So somehow a MMO that is less successful than FF14 still manages their needed cash shop customer friendlier than FF14? Doesnt that just show that maybe just maybe FF14 does not need a cash shop or at least not one with such prices and could still function quite well?