Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
They're luxury products specifically designed to be sold to players willing to pay a premium for bonus goods. It's a sound business practice and a highly successful one.
There were luxury items before the cash shop came along as well, but they were all obtainable with effort instead of opening your wallet. The cashshop is a shill pure and simple.

What they should do is just make cash shop items sellable on the market board. That way people opposed to the cash shop can get it for gil if they want (albeit for a very high fee), and the person selling gets well paid. It would also have the benefit of fighting illegal RMT by keeping the RMT in-house. Why go to some shady site and give them your credit card details for some gil when you can just buy a Cloud bike and sell it on the MB for 150m.