Stop Making Should-Be Achievement Gear.."Optional Gear"

[Talraen]

But doesnt that mean that the game itself is not running that well if it needs cash shop on top of the sub to get a bigger budget or to get new servers? I mean isnt that kinda scary? What if people will stop buying things from the cash shop? Will we never ever get an server upgrade again? Will we get less content in the expansion after SB if the cash shop is worse than now? A subscription MMO needing the cash shop to survive would imo mean that they dont have enough sub numbers..which would mean that it would be not profitable if they will stop putting things in the cash shop..more and more things in the cash shop could also at the same time mean that sub numbers will drop -> need more items in the cash shop to make up for this.

SE is a really big company and FF14 1.0 really went bad thus I can imagine that SE itself did not want to give the devs a really nice budget to work with..just in case that ARR and HW would be a failure too. I just believe that they finally are believing that this game will do good and are reinvesting the money into it. I also cant see how a budget can be tripled just by cash shop. That would be one hell of sold items.

Look at it this way: if FFXIV "needs" the cash shop to survive, what that means is that the cash shop is keeping subscription prices down. It also means that if the cash shop were to fail in the way you describe, they would either tighten the budget on the game, or raise sub prices. In which case the cash shop is saving money for anyone who doesn't buy anything from it.

I think we all focus way too much on exactly what money comes from where and goes to where. The bottom line is, if FFXIV makes more money (however they do it), they are likely to spend more money on it, and vice-versa.

So somehow a MMO that is less successful than FF14 still manages their needed cash shop customer friendlier than FF14? Doesnt that just show that maybe just maybe FF14 does not need a cash shop or at least not one with such prices and could still function quite well?

No. It doesn't necessary mean anything, but it somewhat implies that FFXIV's model makes them more money than Wildstar's does. While I don't think it's entirely fair to draw that conclusion, I have no idea how one would draw the opposite conclusion. Can you explain?