The whale mount is up on Mogstation

[alimdia]

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 thing is that no one is asking them to give anything for free, this is not a free to play game, absolutely nothing we get here is free, we are paying for everything.

I have no reason to believe the plans to make a moogle mount or whale mount would be discarded if there was no cash shop, it's not like development of the base game depends on the cash shop, because again this isn't a free to play game.

Not necessarily at all since market trends are a constantly revolving door and the people buying from the cash shop haven't influenced anything that already wasn't in place from the past, this isn't a completely new trend at all that has recently surfaced like you're making it out to be. It's just a more common placed one now since people who have the extra income voluntarily want to spend it on things they they like and see. No one would buy anything if they didn't like what they saw. Micro transactions have been a thing since Facebook's inception of Farmville from 2009 (maybe sooner than that), and before that lootboxes have been a thing since 2004 (maybe sooner than that). This trend has been going on for at least 14 years minimum.

And sorry to say, but the needs of many outweigh the few that don't want it. People need to let go of the past, we're not going back to it.

You don't have to pay a sub to play farmville though, none of facebook games had a sub, they were f2p that depended on the cash shop to exist.

What I can tell you is that we used to buy old event items before they decided to move that to the cash shop. We used to be able to sell old event items in the market and now we can't. We didn't even get a chance to get old event furniture if you already participated in the relevant event and got the achievement because the cash shop got in the way, and now the frequency of cash shop addition has accelerated.

I don't know what you mean about "the need of many", who exactly needs microtransactions?