Quote Originally Posted by Raoabolic View Post
And is this the future/present you want this game to have? At least the free games have a (flimsy) excuse why they bleed their playerbase dry. Either remove the subscription or stop pulling F2P nonsense, SE. Pick a lane and say on it! Eh, it doesn't matter at this point though, there are plenty willing to throw money at cosmetics so what incentive does CBU3 have in making content when they can reuse meshes and slap a new texture over it for 20 dollars!
I'm not saying what SE does is right. I'm just saying it's the least egregious of them by far. I can see the gradual worsening of the cash shop over time, with more items and mounts, and them becoming more expensive. However, for the time being it's still by far not a problem that other "F2P" mmos have, and that's by virtue of it being one of the last remaining sub-based mmos. There are no sub-based games or B2P games like GW2 anymore because it's simply not as profitable as F2P games. The following is completely speculation as I'm not a game dev, but $15/month has been unchanged for WoW and FF14 since the 2000s (2013 for xiv). imo, with the how crazy the costs are for game development now, as well as inflation, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that $15/month might not be enough to sustain development. So it's not completely evil to me that they use the cash shop to cover some of the costs, especially since the cash shop in FF14 isn't that egregious.