Quote Originally Posted by Amnmaat View Post
You're contradicting yourself
You simply didn't understand me. The so called rigorous process you mentioned isn't something unique to races only. Everything in the game goes through it already. Be it new races, lore, cutscenes, gear, etc. Even beast tribes would go through that. A playable race is not a unique kind of product that companies treat differently at those stages. Furthermore, Yoshida never mentioned any of that being an issue when adding a new race in the same link you posted. The cost of these processes is not new and is not a continuous cost that carries on once you implement the product. So they can easily push content here and there to fit it in if they wanted to. But what comes after is the main cost that they're worried about. Furthermore, Bangaas are already in the game. So what you mentioned isn't really the issue if they wanted to add them.

Quote Originally Posted by Amnmaat View Post
You're conflating the word cost and you're actually agreeing with my statement. The problem is not cost, the problem is everything other than cost. The difference is that male Viera and Hrothgar would get through; Bangaa however would require extra work at all levels, specially the marketing level; they wouldn't even pass the marketing level haha.
You do know that the time spent on QA and debugging is still considered a cost. And what Yoshida said by "can’t be solved simply by throwing more money or people at it" doesn't mean there's no cost. The whole point is labeled " The Cost of Developing a New Playable Race". Cost isn't just money and people. Time is also included, which I have stated in my post. And if you read Yoshida's response carefully, you'll see he was referring to trying to maintain the 3.5 month major patch cycles. So time is the major concern for him in that line. The issue with QA and debugging isn't that you have to pay more money for it or need more manpower. It's time consuming. And the more stuff you have to worry about, the more it negatively affects you, thus becomes a cost for conducting QA/debugging.

Which brings us back to the issue that just simply adding a new playable race will incur additional cost on the development team that will last till the entire life of the game. The cost of the things you mentioned is something they only worry about for one time and be done with it. They create different beast tribes each expansion. So it's really not that much of an issue compared to having to maintain a playable race throughout the game. Debugging and QA will still carry on regardless if they're new races or not.

Bangaa however would require extra work
AKA cost. And again, this doesn't mean that this is the reason they won't add Bangaa. It's the same reason male Miqote and female Roegadyen and Highlanders were the first to be added before Au ra. And it's the reason they would start with male Viera and Female Hrothgar. And that's players' demand, not the reasons you mentioned. The second point in Yoshida's response proves that demand is what gave us Viera in the game. If your points were true, they would have added Viera only and ignored Hrothgar, since they've already done the work for Viera back in Heavensward. Furthermore, the dev team's desire to develop something is also under consideration. Au ra were added instead of Viera because they wanted them to be all-new original race of FFXIV. So I have yet to see any of the reasons you mentioned being an issue in any official source.