Seriously SE???

[charlemagne]

I expected it to be about £40, and would be perfectly happy if it is. I have no qualms about paying the price of a quality product for a quality product.

[dice137]

The beast that is "gamer's entitlement" is STRONG in this OP.

[Tiggy]

2.0 was cheap largely as an apology for 1.0 and because they thought they would have to win us over.

3.0 arguably has more content than 2.0 did AND they no longer have to win us back. The price honestly is reasonable.

[aisustrong]

ITT: whiny greedy little babies.
god forbid people actually get paid for working. how dare they.

[Phe]

ITT: whiny greedy little babies.
god forbid people actually get paid for working. how dare they.

number of the day:

with the subscription fees 3000 employees can earn 2167$ every month.

[TouchandFeel]

number of the day:

with the subscription fees 3000 employees can earn 2167$ every month.

The income a company earns does not go straight into their pockets. A large percent of it goes into basic operations costs such as renting the office space, paying for utilities (their servers and computers run on electricity after all), and a ton of other things. Then there are other costs such as marketing and events, paying for voice actors for cut-scenes, and the list goes on.

You can't calculate money made without factoring in money spent.

Also in many of the cities that such development companies are in, $2000 a month is not really all that much when cost of living is accounted for.

[aisustrong]

number of the day:

with the subscription fees 3000 employees can earn 2167$ every month.

hmmm
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living...ayCurrency=USD

Average Monthly Disposable Salary (After Tax) 2,225.76 $

my statement stands.

[Phe]

hmmm
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living...ayCurrency=USD


my statement stands.

with the subscription fees 300 employees can earn 21667$ every month.
and you can't tell me more than 300 people are involved with ARR on a regular basis.

Seriously, even with a generous estimation i don't think personnel cost is more than 1,5m / month.
Let all other expenditures for ARR (servers, events, hardware, electricity, rentals...) be another 1,5m
- that's 3m of expenditures with a monthly income of 8m subscription fees and cash shop = 5m pure profit.

c'mon give me an estimation more concrete, realistic and convincing than mine.
I can't be completely wrong here.

[MasamuneBranford]

c'mon give me an estimation more concrete, realistic and convincing than mine.
I can't be completely wrong here.

Legacy players pay $10 per month. It's also cheaper to pay several months in advance. 8M is a lot for 500k players. But you're missing investment time. These games take like 5-10 years to develop before release (it can take years to recoup these expenses). Server costs are hugely expensive and they are located around the world. You've got rent space, buildings, utilities, property taxes, benefits paid to employees (health, dental, life insurance, pension, retirement), composers, liability insurance, marketing, HR, headhunter recruiters, income taxes (International, US Federal, State), franchise taxes, the list goes on and on. Ha - you're missing a boat load of expenses.

Income taxes alone fractions your numbers. I think you need to do a little bit more thinking.

[kyuven]

and you can't tell me more than 300 people are involved with ARR on a regular basis.

Trust me, there's more than 300 people involved. 300 people may just be the in-house staff. There's still the likes of temp agencies for CS, accountants, and legal, all of which are probably shared with Square-Enix's other divisions. Just handling the international support for the game would require a minimum of 3 different offices (JP, NA, EU) and about 100 personnel for each one. Granted most of these personnel take in far less money than, say, the development team, but there still needs to be a lot of them to meet the needs of the playerbase. There needs to be phone support, email support, website support, and in-game support for more than 5 dozen servers. And they need representation from English, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, and likely many other languages.
Yeah, CS is a mess.
Then there's taxes, and the accounting departments, and the legal team.
Basically the FFXIV's calculated "5m pure profit" gets shredded to pieces when you start chopping it up for taxes and paying for additional offices/services. And that's before getting into other contracts.
Let me put it this way: If it were as profitable as you're implying, why are there so few P2P MMOs left?
"doing the math" is no substitute for simple logic in this case.