Steam payment HUGE price increase!

[Felis]

2) If we open a link we only see legacy sub there. So it either another broken ToS or way to loophole their ToS. Depending on the country its either SE fault for not posting non legacy sub or they can change any nonlegacy sub any time without any warning.
Because SE has money and lawyers it will be 2nd, so noone is safe now. Not even NA.

http://support.eu.square-enix.com/fa...la=2&kid=64539

The fees for FINAL FANTASY XIV are located here.

[Texa]

And to the dude above, no one is throwing a fit at Yoshida. Hold back the strawmen a little.

Several of us have already pointed out the decision to change the prices was outside of Yoshida's control. He's in charge of the game development, not the publishing.

[Nezia]

It would be nice if we had a faq on the front page of some kind since so much of the thread had turned into people repeating themselves.

Hum... I think that most people already know what is going on, the 'offical' SE response and my TL;DR about it made it pretty clear what the relation between Steam and SE is.

I believe that most are just playing dumb in order to take credibility away from the ones who got affected by the changes, since they can not post here what they are really thinking about the issue. Read the comments on SidAlpha video and you will understand what most people who are on SE side are actually thinking.

[Drakanoth]

Also, upon checking, it dawned on me why people insist on one time payments via steam. A recurring payment links your card and is always the same amount, and does not allow Steam Wallet to integrate itself, so your Steam Wallet funds can't go towards your subscription. But with one time payments, people can resell Steam cards and get funds into their Steam Wallets and then use that money to pay for game time.

You can only get cards from games you bought, amigo, with money, they aren't free, and cards are worth cents, for someone to be able to pay for a subscription selling cards they'd have to get a whole library of games (wasting way more money than they would make with cards), because each game is restricted to giving you 3-5 cards cards only. You can't even get a dollar with them.

[Vizu00]

I\'ll give you some notion of how much it costs to keep a MMORPG running,the numbers were taken from Blizzard, however the rates shouldn\'t be much different else, as you said, square wouldn\'t be able to pump content every 3 months.


Server upkeep per player: 0,1usd
Development + customer service + regional support(website etc) : 1-5 USD
Profits: everything else

Should be noted that Blizzard were recovering all the costs of the last 4 years of WoW development every 2 months.
And this rates a probably skewed, since wow overall costs most certainly have fallen.
This means that square could actually keep Russia subscription price at 5 USD and still make a profit, albeit a small one.

Any digital good you have a threshold that you recover the initial investment and your profit becomes almost 100%u0025 of the product price since the reproduction cost is negligible.

For a MMORPG once you have a certain amount of players you will only have an increase in costs once the current server infrastructure cannot support the playerbase, and it is a one time increase so you don\'t need to consider it in the long term.

What happens nowadays is that most mmorpgs cannot get to the first threahold, because WoW exists offering a huge amount of content for a set price, this means that you can never think about charging more than wow sub if you want to go the P2P route. So you need to offer "better" content for the same price as WoW, since you only need a minimum amount of subscribers to remain operational (look at ffxi).

Your operation costs are fixed at 0,1 USD per player and your allocated resources for the development are fixed, so a strategy is reducing the profit margin( that is huge) so that you can increase the profits by increasing the amount of subscribers. This is called regional pricing.


So I can guarantee you that square wasn\'t losing money on BRs sub and probably wasn\'t losing in the Russian one, they had lower profits, but you cannot claim that the reduced price was not contributing to the development of the game since profit exclude any amount you allocate for "maintenance" of the product since most places set the budget for each project with some antecedence


Tl;Dr: Square wasn\'t offering a subscription for a loss in Russia, so you should be careful with the "offer content for free" statement. Most of the mmo genre problems comes from WoW existence as the standard, and a reduction of players caused by the mobile exodus


P.S. the EU ToS doesn\'t make distinction between a one time payment and a recurring payment, so it is against the ToS the change in the RU prices, even if square only calls it an adjustment

[IzumiOgata]

-snippity snip snip-

While I would love to just go with what you're saying, since it would fall perfectly with my objectives, please give us some sources on that or else it will only sound like noise to most people.

Thanks in advance!

[Vizu00]

I'll hunt the blizz source, will take some time since I'm on mobile, (I had to edit the post 3 times for it to become readable) the part about the ToS you can find it on the EU ffxiv site, and regarding the budget allocation an economist/ administrator can confirm what I said.

Square would have to mention to investors that they were operating in a loss in some regions, since I never saw some buzz about this I believe they never lost money with the regional pricing

[Shedon]

Still haven't got an anwser to my ticket ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Moonlite]

And you're still acting as though I'm defending SE. I replied to a very specific post.

Sorry you thought I was sarcastic. I agree with you. The company values bottom line over customer service.

[Katsuragi_]

Sorry you thought I was sarcastic. I agree with you. The company values bottom line over customer service.

No my dude, yours is not the post I meant to quote. The browser's form auto completion screwed it up and I hadn't noticed. Sorry.