Cash shop pricing is getting a bit much...

[Remyogic]

I bought the mount, the other items are meh for me. I don't think the prices are out of control, YES, I wish they were cheaper (anyone would love to get cool stuff for cheap/free), but no of us really know the development and overhead costs of these items on the back-end.

I think the bigger question is, where IS this money going? I'm no software developer nor am i any kind of expert on how companies budget their money, but it does make me wonder how much of the month from the subs and mogstation actually goes back into the game.

There is ALOT that goes on behind the scenes that we as players never see/know of. The subscription we pay has to pay the salary of EVERY person who works on the FFXIV team, not just Devs, you have coders/programmers, testers, admins, QA, R&D, artists, IT, accounting, customer service/support, marketing, legal, HR, leadership, and probably many more I haven't thought of. Each of these departments are large individually. This doesn't mention overhead costs such as Utilities, Buildings, Servers, Networks, Hiring/Firing, Benefits, Taxes, Janitorial, Office Supplies, Computers/Equipment, Software Licenses, Maintenance, and Stock Dividends. Lastly we have PROFIT, yes, this comes very last after ALL of this is paid for. Keep in mind, very few, if any of the jobs are minimum wage paying jobs. The majority of these people are making, rightly so, comfortable middle-class level wages.

Everything is budgeted for the game to continue operating with a certain amount budgeted for future development based on their goals and timelines, likely YEARS in advance. If the need to expand the budget to offer more features, items, or whatever; that money has to come from somewhere. They are a business, they aren't the U.S. Government and just spend more money, going into trillions of dollars of debt, just cause people want something.