Quote Originally Posted by Ranaku View Post
The big question is, why are subscription fees staying the same since launch of the game and since the dawn of MMOs? I mean there is inflation and higher cost for marketing and employees and all that since MMOs started but it is still only 12.99 most of the time.

So why is that...? Yes cause stuff like the cashshop exist. It's a nice way to allow "poor" people to also enjoy the game at low sub costs and gives players who pump the money for them into the company a neat reward in return.

Always remember, your sub fee isn't covering anything but the bare bare necessities. If SE doubles the sub fee and THEN still keeps the cash shop the same you can complain. But at this moment a huge part of the playerbase is only able to play this game cause the cashshop exists. MMOs don't make huge profits compared to other games, MMOs are costly to maintain and to think that all that has to be covered by a sub fee that never is actually changed despite any higher production costs or inflation is just insane on your part.

Also play BDO for a bit where outfits cost 50 bucks and almost all dyes are bound to the cashshop if you don't want to play for years to get the dye you actually need.
You are very wrong about everything except that BDO sucks.

MMOs with subscription fees are extremely profitable even with a small amount of players. It's the entire reason FFXI and WoW and 100 other games that came after the success of the original EverQuest exist. XI alone made more money for SE than any other game in the series despite being purchased by a tiny fraction of the number of people who bought games like X or XIII. The reason other ones "don't make huge profits" is because they failed; FFXIV is not a failure (well, 2.0 on isn't) and it's not barely paying for employees and maintenance costs like those failures.

There are millions of people paying for FFXIV every month. That's tens of millions in USD coming in every month. If there were 7.7 million players, it would be over $100m. Servers and dev salaries don't even come close to touching this amount of money.

The reason the cash shop exists is because some executives at SE realized that they have a partially captive audience to get more money from. People are attached to their characters, attached to the game, spend hundreds or thousands of hours of their time in it, and this makes it easy for them to justify spending more money on it than their subscription fee. That's the whole reason - they added paid items because they knew people would pay for it.

The reason they haven't increased subscription fees, in addition to the fact that they're already turning a massive profit, is that they know that price increases are received very negatively by subscribers. They are more likely to lose money by angering people than gain it by increasing fees.

tl;dr: Company does things for profit, not as some kind of charity to "let" you play the game.