New winter glam for mogstation and not xmas event

[Iscah]

I just want to note the only reason I am upset is the last time we got a Christmas outfit was the Choir set in 2018. Thankfully I have been playing long enough to have a Christmas outfit I gained for free but 4 years seems a bit excessive to not hand out a new outfit, especially given the wave of players ShB and EW brought.

That's fair, and now you mention it, that is a long wait. The closest we got was the chocobo barding, and I never like the designs for barding.

[DPZ2]

That's fair, and now you mention it, that is a long wait. The closest we got was the chocobo barding, and I never like the designs for barding.

Get creative. This gear is not a seasonal event award, or on the cash shop. It is found in-game and dyed.

[Xeronia]

Get creative. This gear is not a seasonal event award, or on the cash shop. It is found in-game and dyed.

While I adore the Darbar set it is is a max level item. I am still a bit disappointed it has been 4 years since a level 1 for all class holiday glam for Christmas.

[Iscah]

Get creative. This gear is not a seasonal event award, or on the cash shop. It is found in-game and dyed.

I did not at any point mention a lack of red gear with white trim.

Seasonal event awards can be a chance to get something different. Find niches that need filling. Even something as simple as a holly hairpin would be nice.

Also, in addition to the Darbar gear being max level, they are potentially elusive dungeon sets and limited to specific classes. Glamour gear is at least potentially something you can incorporate into glamour for any job.

[Raoabolic]

And therein lay the point I was trying to make; F2P games are FAR more reliant on whales spending money in their cash shops, than a subscription model game. And as I said in an earlier post, games with business models of that nature do tend to suffer in some way or another; the emphasis on trying to keep whales invested in throwing their credit cards at gamble boxes or big-ticket cash shop items means that higher quality story and battle content are often neglected.

So what's the excuse for XIV going for whales with unique mounts and glamours? Not to mention the level and skipping potions. Besides, we can have this discussion until our fingers go numb but SE is going to be SE and I believe this is yet another mogshop test (that passed with a resounding success!) to see if they can create some cash shop only items for seasonal events. I would not be shocked if this will be a common thing now. Want every seasonal item? Better add a gratuity tip to that subscription, lol.

[Iscah]

So what's the excuse for XIV going for whales with unique mounts and glamours? Not to mention the level and skipping potions.

At the most optimistic viewpoint, it means that I get a cheaper base subscription while the people who want everything can pay extra for it.

Paying for job and story skips also makes logical sense, on the acceptance* that the basic transaction of this game is that we spend a certain amount of money and time to level up our character, buying a skip is effectively spending the same money without the time. You can spend two months playing through the story or you can pay the equivalent of two months' subscription to jump to the end result.

Whether it is indeed acceptable is probably a separate debate, but it's the current structure whether we like it or not.

[Raoabolic]

At the most optimistic viewpoint, it means that I get a cheaper base subscription while the people who want everything can pay extra for it.

Paying for job and story skips also makes logical sense, on the acceptance* that the basic transaction of this game is that we spend a certain amount of money and time to level up our character, buying a skip is effectively spending the same money without the time. You can spend two months playing through the story or you can pay the equivalent of two months' subscription to jump to the end result.

Whether it is indeed acceptable is probably a separate debate, but it's the current structure whether we like it or not.

To be honest, I would rather they just increase the cost per month and do away with the cash shop and just add those sorts of items in game. Some can even be locked behind ultimate fights, at least you have to actually play the game to earn them.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Where is this insider information coming from?

Yoshi-P himself.

He's said over several liveletters that the mogstation team is effectively an autonomous team that does what it wants as long as it doesn't collide with what the actual FF14 team is doing in regards to outfits/mounts/etc. He even described the woman who leads the mogstation team as a scary 'Empress' type of person.

Which makes this topic even more amusing for the sole fact that the outfit was always going to the mogstation - because the FF14 team had nothing to do with it besides signing off on it. Starlight 2022's reward was always going to be the reindeer and that was it, there was nothing ever 'stolen' here, there was nothing stopping the FF14 dev team from also making a glamour...except for recent history precedent where they only make one 'big' reward for an event, meaning it was a glamour or a mount, so they went with the obvious choice.

The mulitmillion corporation could stop at the monthly fee and just add some grinding to keep the subs active but SE chose greed over steady profits. Sorry you had to find out this way. :/

First off, welcome to capitalism. Businesses exist to make as much money as they can because they have these dudes called 'shareholders' & 'investors' that want to see a company make more and more profit so their investment can in turn. Shocking concept, I know.

Sorry, but I'm gonna have to blow your mind here: Without the mogstation, FF14 wouldn't even generate 'steady profits', it'd be a blip in the financial report and barely worth the maintenance costs to run for the company comparatively. The cost for AAA game development has been rising rapidly the past half a decade, alongside inflation. The fact the $15/month sub price hasn't risen in close to a decade is almost entirely thanks to the mogstation allowing others to pick up your tab of the true monthly sub price. Let's do some math, shall we?

Lucky Bancho's latest census for 6.2 puts about 1.45million active characters. Now for the sake of giving every advantage possible to the sub profits by stacking everything in its favor, lets pretend each and every one of those 1.45million characters is a unique service account (absolutely untrue) that is also paying $15/month (also absolutely untrue, between entry & legacy sub costs), and finally, pretend every single character is subbed every single month of the year (also untrue). Factoring in everything, this equates to about $261million/year. and this is the theoretical highest.

Yoshida: At any given time there are about 350 people involved in the development of FFXIV. During busy periods that goes up to about 500 or so. If you include the management team it's probably around 650 people.

We'll use the low number of 350 here to continue stacking the advantage as hard as possible towards the sub cost. Even if we pretend every single person on the dev team has a $30,000/year salary (Absolutely untrue when the 30 some odd directors/executives in the credits would each command a 100k salary at the minimum, let alone the many programmers that would command salaries in the upper range towards 80-100k), that'd still be $10million in salaries. Realistically, we're looking more towards 15mil - 20mil. Then comes Datacenter fees for 4 datacenter locations in the world. Then comes costs of server procurement for new DCs like Materia & Dynamis. Which lemme tell ya with the chip shortage, ain't cheap.

Even stacking everything in the sub costs's favor, FF14 barely makes 200million ish a year using 2022 player counts. The actual amount it makes would be closer to the 150mil range using more realistic numbers. It was even lower in previous years due to less players overall.

To put this all into perspective, a single mobile game made more than the entire MMO division combined that year. And that was back in 2018, where FF14's income was much lower so that game curbstomped it even harder comparatively.

In corporate speak, FF14 with only sub revenue is comparatively a net negative to run, considering they could take the entirety of CBU3 along with all the resources FF14 holds up and use them to make a bunch of final fantasy/DQ mobile games that would turn out far more profit than FF14 ever could in the same time frame. In my own experience working for AAA game studios, I have zero doubts that mogstation's profits are the primary reason Yoshi-P can justify to the board of directors, investment & shareholders why FF14 is a good investment to keep running for the company, when it eats up such a huge amount of resources compared to the mobile division, or the cheaper 'one, done, ship it out, maintain small skeleton crew for patches' model of non-service games & their DLC. At the end of the day, $$$ is the only thing that matters to them, and Mogstation cash is the majority of the profit from FF14.

Welcome to the present & future of AAA gaming Raoabolic. Given your post history on this forum, I'd genuinely suggest jumping off at the next stop to indie game land and never look back, because the industry ain't changing regardless of what people think - when AAA game development costs are ever rising, profits have to be found somewhere, and lootboxes/microtransactions/cash shops are the easiest way to do it since it lets the tiny few pick up the tab for the vast majority. Luckily Square chose the more respectful method of implementing one and made it 99% aesthetics with a very hazy case of p2w...considering that the level skips & job boosts save nothing more than time, and don't actually give you the power to 'win' anything, considering you still have to play the latest expansion legit anyway.

Or you can just ask the Diablo Immortal players what a truly hostile cash-shop / microtranscation model looks like. Or how plenty of F2P MMOs effectively force you to spend way more than FF14's sub cost per month if you don't want to absolutely tear your hair out over hostile systems like locking half your inventory slots behind a paywall for $20/month. Mogstation ain't perfect, but it's a necessary evil. An evil that is much kinder than the vast majority of its brethren.

To be honest, I would rather they just increase the cost per month and do away with the cash shop and just add those sorts of items in game. Some can even be locked behind ultimate fights, at least you have to actually play the game to earn them.

Dodging the extremely obvious point that in order to match the Mogstation's profits they'd likely have to double or even triple the sub price per month which would instantly kill the game overnight, do you honestly believe that if the price was adjusted by what it needed to be for Square to consider it worth it, that every single player would stay with the new price point? The increased price would just be countered by people leaving, making it pointless and only damaging to the product. There's a reason increasing the price of subscriptions is the last thing most services want to do - its a massive risk/reward system since it has just as high potential to backfire on you. Especially in an industry like video gaming where you have endless competition.

Also, spoiler alert: you are assuming those items would even be put into the game in such a scenario. Not having the mogstation doesn't magically give the FF14 dev team more time to program stuff into the game.

Considering the mogstation team is completely autonomous in what they do based on what Yoshi-P said, it's almost guaranteed if the mogstation team didn't work on the items they make, they wouldn't exist. Only ones that may have would be the Korean/Chinese stuff since the dev team is contractually obligated to make that stuff for them so they'd have been made anyway.

[Iscah]

Yoshi-P [has] even described the woman who leads the mogstation team as a scary 'Empress' type of person.

If anyone makes a statement like that about a co-employee in a public presentation, then I would highly expect it was said in a more joking manner than you are portraying it to be.

[Payadopa]

To be honest, I would rather they just increase the cost per month and do away with the cash shop and just add those sorts of items in game. Some can even be locked behind ultimate fights, at least you have to actually play the game to earn them.

I agree. Nowadays I prefer a subscription over anything F2P. And XIV is like quadruple dipping at this point.