
Originally Posted by
Mikki
Indeed that's exactly the problem. These kind of "products" are made with little effort and only need to be produced once and can be replicated indefinitely basically for free for the company, making millions of dollars at virtually no cost in comparison. I'm not at all surprised that a company will do these things. If we as individuals could make money in such a manner...wouldn't we do that as well? The answer is, probably. Yeah. If we could get away with it and didn't care about others. But there is a famous saying, you know? "A fool and their money are easily parted". It becomes this thought process of, "If someone is stupid enough to spend their money on that, then who are we to judge?" and this line of thinking becomes the defense for doing these practices in the first place. But it's a terrible practice. It's basically saying "I don't care about the people who are supporting me, I only want to see how much money I can make out of them".
But here's the thing; you can't necessarily fault a company for doing this. After all, as I just said above... most people would do this if they could get away with it. That's why it's so dangerous to have people defending this kind of practice. I have absolutely no qualms with SE trying to make money - or any company, for that matter. But I want them to EARN that money from my pocket. If you are going to make me pay for something extra outside of my sub fees, then first of all I want to see that you actually put effort into it, none of this low effort BS we're seeing with this app. But secondly, I want to see that my money that I am spending extra on your MMO is actually going back into that MMO to improve it. I'm not seeing that with FFXIV as much as it pains me to say. I mean, even the forums. I can't post this without being cut off from a word limit that means nothing since you can just edit a post anyway. And the game itself....don't even get me started on all the issues.
And the worst part is, the way companies that DO get away with it manage to do so is, as you pretty much mentioned, by making it "optional". But absolutely every little thing that is not directly tied to the main story questline is "optional" if you want to push it that way. Do you want to level everything on one character? Well, honestly that's optional. You can just make a new character. What if they made you have to pay to unlock additional jobs? Do you want access to glamour at all? Optional. Want to pay for that too? There are so many things in this game that are "optional", it becomes a very dangerous and slippery slope to just say "well, it's optional so it's fine that they charge us extra for it", especially when not only are some of the things ridiculously overpriced, but also MONTHLY. Although I think we should be given additional space for free due to the item bloat of this game, I would honestly be happy if I could just buy an additional retainer for a flat $20, one time. I honestly don't even buy the bullshit excuse of "they need the money to pay for the server space for your extra storage" because if you fail to pay for your retainer, you lose the retainer...but when you get them back all of your stuff remains. Which means, regardless of if you are actively paying or not, they are storing that data.