Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[WhiteArchmage]

Again, you're not following the train of thought you present with the topic of "Fantasia addicts".
Ok, so lets pretend to be a "Fantasia addict" who buys a potion to change every week.
New race comes out ... what do we do?

A- Use my 1 potion a week on jumping into a new race and buy potions as often as I normally would
B- Buy TWICE as many potions for now on cause now I wanna change every 3 days instead of every 7

Why would you do B? What would prompt you to now buy more potions more often when you already buy WAY more than normal? You can tweak and twerk all day in the Benchmark or through making an alt for much of the broad information about how things look in game and things become pretty clear with a lil leg work. No reason to up your "Fantasia addiction" for a new race. If you're already changing appearances often you're just gonna keep doing that but with more choices each time.

As for new subs there's no way to tell how many people would buy the game and pay the sub just for a race. That seems like it would be an very rare answer for why you picked up a MMO. Again, if this were purely profitable then why would a company with far more incentive to make a profit than you look at the numbers and say "nope, no more races after this. Can't handle it"? Why do other successful MMOs not add them?

Cause the pay off for that effort isn't worth the work it requires. So for us to get what we're getting is truly a gift and labor of love to expand the ways players can express themselves.

Your argument defeats itself with the Live Letter reason for Hrothgar, though, since Yoshi-P even stated they don't know how much they will be played but they wanted to make them because the player demand was there. A lesser player demand than the one we have now (in amount of people making noise for the missing genders). But that's one of those pesky things called facts that don't fit your narrative (seeing the Forum reaction, they may displace a lot of Roes and a small percentage of the other races, but there's no crystal ball to say how many will stay Hroth, add it to their regular Fantasia rotation, or try and drop. There's no crystal ball to say how many will change and stay Viera, for that matter).

Not to mention it doesn't have to be "Fantasia addicts," I myself expressed that the plan was to switch between male and female Viera every other month, and at least another poster expressed the same. How many non-binary players (or simply players that enjoy a change of look every once in a while) but don't post in the forums do you think there are? Or the average player that messes around in the benchmark and thinks "Oh, this race/gender looks cool...but I don't wanna make an alt...I could change to this" Reducing it to the hyperbolic "no one will play this/oh, just Fantasia addicts" is missing a whole bunch of middle ground.

Plus it'd help them on the PR side: "SE listens to players!" "SE believes in gender equality! Says Gender-exclusive races are thing of the past!" "Male Viera revealed for the first time in FF game!"

No, we have no way of knowing how many subs will be crated/upgraded/retaken, but when you add possible new subs or upgraded subs with all the other reasons it, well, adds up.