Cash shop pricing is getting a bit much...

[HyoMinPark]

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.

While all of this is true, I do think it is also important to note that SE has, in the past, used funds from FFXIV to fund other projects, notably FFXV. It’s very likely that a lot of FFXIV’s income is going towards supporting the new FFVII remake. While the Mogstation was responsible for making the EU servers possible, SE’s track record of using FFXIV as a money-funnel for their other titles stands against them. I’m not saying the cash shop funds are definitely going into other titles, but I am saying that it would not surprise me if they were.


As for the new cash shop items, the prices have already had precendents long before now; when the Far Eastern Lady/Lord’s Attire came into the shop (September 2016–I remember because Patch 3.4 had just released and I was doing Sophia Ex in the Chinese dress), they were $18 USD each, and there was the $10 Far Eastern Barding included in their release as well.

All other Chinese/Korean outfits have been $18 USD each since then.
The Carbuncle Attire followed suit, also at $18 USD for each type.
—Compare these to the NPC outfits, which are ~$15 USD if I remember correctly, undyeable, where as the $18 USD outfits are all dyeable.
All account-wide mounts have been $24 USD since Slepnir’s release, save for the Fat Moogle ($30 USD), but it is a two-seater.
All chocobo bardings have generally been $10 USD as well.

The pricing is no surprise; at least, not to me. Nor is having the entire set of an item released at once. That being said, I find all items completely unappealing, so their being in the Mogstation doesn’t really affect me since I will never buy them. However, I have noticed the influx of cash shop items increasing as of late. I do not think it is affecting the glamours available in-game (inb4 someone misconstrues my words); I am just noting that there have been a lot of additions specifically to the cash shop this year—some of which were questionable, like the Hildebrand attire...did anyone actually ask for that?