The whale mount is up on Mogstation

[Bourne_Endeavor]

It's a bit disingenuous to say that you're not affecting the market. This current market trend in games was only solidified because people kept buying into microtransactions for things that were already offered for no additional cost. If they add a lootbox tomorrow and no one buys it that would be the end of it, but if people started buying it then you're gonna see more and more items added to the lootbox, when before the lootbox said items would have been part of the sub price at no additional cost.

Actually, this is disingenuous itself because you're still assuming all these cash shop items will be funneled back into the game. They won't. Companies will simply stop making them entirely. As stated in my post above, a greedy company doesn't start giving away stuff for free once people stop buying it. They stop producing to begin with since it's no longer profitable. This Whale exists because it was going on the cash shop and would earn SE $30 for each purchase. Take away said profit and why do you expect them to still work on something that no longer has any financial benefit to them? Saying it used to be apart of our sub assumes content is being cut to be sold back to us. If something was never designed in the first place, it cannot be cut.

Now do some companies abuse this practice? Of course. In fact, since you mentioned lootboxes, I'll point to Star Wars: Battlefront II and how EA lost several millions because people discovered they were intentionally screwing character progression in order to incentivize lootboxes. For comparison sake, in FFXIV, we occasionally have an exclusive mount which is functionally identical to every other mount in the game. Star Wars released with a grind that took over 4,000 hours to obtain everything. You could take every single grind in all of FFXIV combined and not spend that much time on them. What comes down to is many people do not necessarily mind cosmetic micro-transactions or DLC they feel is worth the investment. Should a company get out of hand, the playerbase will bite back. Enough people don't feel SE's approach of purely cosmetic items is a big deal.

Now you may not like that approach, but that's a difference of opinion and nothing more. People who do aren't naive, gullible or wasteful. They simply have more money than you (general) and are willing to spend it on luxurious other people either can't afford or don't feel its worth their money.

[Yshnal]

Actually, this is disingenuous itself because you're still assuming all these cash shop items will be funneled back into the game. They won't. Companies will simply stop making them entirely. As stated in my post above, a greedy company doesn't start giving away stuff for free once people stop buying it. They stop producing to begin with since it's no longer profitable. This Whale exists because it was going on the cash shop and would earn SE $30 for each purchase. Take away said profit and why do you expect them to still work on something that no longer has any financial benefit to them? Saying it used to be apart of our sub assumes content is being cut to be sold back to us. If something was never designed in the first place, it cannot be cut.

Now do some companies abuse this practice? Of course. In fact, since you mentioned lootboxes, I'll point to Star Wars: Battlefront II and how EA lost several millions because people discovered they were intentionally screwing character progression in order to incentivize lootboxes. For comparison sake, in FFXIV, we occasionally have an exclusive mount which is functionally identical to every other mount in the game. Star Wars released with a grind that took over 4,000 hours to obtain everything. You could take every single grind in all of FFXIV combined and not spend that much time on them. What comes down to is many people do not necessarily mind cosmetic micro-transactions or DLC they feel is worth the investment. Should a company get out of hand, the playerbase will bite back. Enough people don't feel SE's approach of purely cosmetic items is a big deal.

Now you may not like that approach, but that's a difference of opinion and nothing more. People who do aren't naive, gullible or wasteful. They simply have more money than you (general) and are willing to spend it on luxurious other people either can't afford or don't feel its worth their money.

The current state of FFXIV is a consequence of how some people were welcoming with open arms everything that SE did with the cash shop without a second thought, and they'll keep pushing the line more and more, while giving less and less. The phone app is a direct consequence of that acceptance. As it's the now gone veteran program, which was offering these same things that nowadays SE tries to sell us in the cash shop (what a nice coincidence, right?). Or how they have no urge to fix the inventory issues because that would mean less income from retainers. I could keep going on, but overall what I'm saying is that the cash shop is affecting the game more than a lot of you think.

Worst thing is that some of us warned people years ago, yet here we are, with so many things gone or not properly fixed.