The FFXIV Cash Shop is greedy

[Enla]

This just sounds way too convenient.. pay to have access, but to actually support the game you need to pay for additional items.. right.

In the unlikely event that this is actually true, they're much better off never saying this. It's imo terrible PR and makes SE look very scummy (and disingenuous).

If you look back and consider SE's financial situation back when A Realm Reborn first launched versus how it is now, you'll see why they leech so heavily from this game. FFXIV 2.0 legitimately was their biggest source of income in the gaming department for a long time after several botched and severely financially draining choices made across the board. There was a point when the original 2013 Tomb Raider reboot was considered a financial failure after selling 3.4 million copies because of the severe financial bloat SE was encouraging in all it's gaming projects. For some comparison, 3.4 million copies back in 2013 was insane for a single player game and while I can't find any articles right now to verify the number, I do remember that when this news broke back then there were ideas being tossed around that their desired sales target was something only games like Call of Duty were reaching at the time. It took them a year to make back all the money they spent making that game, and it wasn't the only game of theirs to underperform their expectations either. It was just the one they were the most vocal about and that the gaming community latched onto the hardest.

They've gotten 'better' about budget bloat since then (minus FFXV but that monster was never going to make back nearly 10 years of wasted development) but FFXIV remains their main cookie jar as of right now in part due to those past mistakes. They're never going to give it up, nor really should they. What they should do is take a little less money from the pot so Yoshi-P doesn't end up in situations where he's begging for server upgrades like the last time, but that's a discussion for another day.