Quote Originally Posted by Deveryn View Post
FFXIV gets a free pass because everything on that list beyond the game and subscription is an optional luxury.

I've been playing with no extra retainers for most of the 3 years I've been on. I had about a month or two, where I was a little disorganized in getting crafting caught up. If they gave all that away for free, they'd lose money and we'd probably be losing servers from the broken game content that would be churned out because they can't afford to keep up the pace. It's also foolish not to cash in on people's desires for the nicer things. This is still a business, after all. People have their opinions about content and story direction, but the service has been stable and its expanding thanks to that monetization.

All monetisation in a game needs to have value. In something like Genshin Impact, free-to-play users have to spend more time playing the game in order to progress than those who pay.


In the case of something like WoW or XIV, the monetisation still has value in it's micro-transactions. If you look at the mount models, for example, paid mounts often have some of the best models. Likewise in XIV, a number of paid mounts are from old seasonal events that instead of bringing back and providing more content to play on your subscription, they just make you buy it instead.


Then you get to things like the retainer service or level boosts. They might be optional but there still needs to be valueable. Levelling additional jobs in this game is mega boring and even with the XP increase, too slow... but fear not because you can boost a job to level 80. The retainer service also provides you with additional inventory and marketboard slots which you could argue is a form of pay-to-win as the in-game economy is somewhat important.


The illusion that it's fair and entirely optional will crumble instantly if they ever add the store to the game client... which could happen if some Square Enix executive decides they want more money.