Quote Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo View Post
I couldn't find the statement online after an admittedly cursory search, but I seem to recall somewhere that even Blizzard has stated that without revenue from their cash shop, they would have been forced to raise subscription fees to combat increased technology costs and inflated developer salaries. Customer response to that was overwhelmingly negative, so they took the "optional but costs more at the individual level" approach instead.


Basically, development costs for MMOs have gone up substantially in the past ten years and yet player willingness to spend more than $15 a month has remained very inelastic. For what it's worth, I'd rather pay a higher sub fee, but given the omnipresence of quick-and-dirty freemium games that don't require an initial investment to start up, it seems I'm in the minority.
Just to tack on to this, I'd be curious to see approximately what the operating costs of XIV are. Sure someone could state $15/month X 12 months X 500,000 players = $90,000,000 revenue but if operating and developers costs amount to $88,000,000 (as an extreme example) - it's pretty much not worth it to keep developing and operating FFXIV.