The FFXIV Cash Shop is greedy

[Goji1639]

I don't think you necessarily need to have WoW amount of subscribers to make a WoW quality game. I'm pretty sure WoW is making much less money right now compared to when it was in its prime (2008) yet it doesn't seem like the game is decreasing in quality.

I think there's a limit to how many (quality) developers you can throw at a game and how much budget it will require cause it seems to me you can get in a too many cooks in the kitchen situation and become a mess organization wise.

Just look at ESO, I'm not sure on the exact numbers but it seems to me that ESO required much larger budget than WoW, considering for example how literally every single (side) quest is voice acted, yet they still probably make (or have made) much less money than WoW. (Correct me if I'm wrong, this is purely an assumption).

Not all profit goes into increasing the game's quality since there's a limit to how much you can realistically increase it. It's also clear Blizzard and SE use money from their MMOs to fund other projects (as they should, only makes sense) and it's true you can argue that for SE, FFXIV may need a certain amount of profit to justify its live updates, and perhaps that amount isn't enough for them with subscription alone right now.

However I still believe that more profit could have ensued long term if they had decided to limit the Cash Shop and attract more players.

World of Warcraft leans more heavily on it's cash shop now, and still has the largest subscriber base by a good margin.

It's not really about how much money it takes to create a game the quality World of Warcraft, though, it's how much the game earns. Like you mentioned, companies structure a lot of their projects and finances around consistent revenue streams like MMO's. World of Warcraft has big expectations attached to it, so it sees more investment.

At the end of the day Square has a completely different set of circumstances to consider when determining what's part of the subscription fee and what belongs in the cash shop. All I'm saying is that an item for item comparison to World of Warcraft isn't really fair.