This is just appalling

[floofuf]

snippy snip

I get what you mean, but I have to say if they let us buy an outfit set and hair for $15 and turn around and make a shirt and pants $18.... I feel like that's kinda cheating. Oh well, though. To each their own I guess. I'm still not buying it.

Edit: I guess I mean scummy more than cheating.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

That's very hard to believe, you're very invested in defending the company at every chance, more than any other forumer I've seen. No offense.

Explaining the business perspective isn't a defense of Square Enix. It's simply stating facts. People in this thread act as those Yoshida maliciously tries to pilfer their wallets or that vilifying anyone who does decide to buy these outfits is okay. It may come across callous, but people assume large companies like Square, EA, Ubisoft and etc care about any of our feelings. They don't. They care about our money and how they can get it without overreaching. Once again, this isn't a defense on any of those companies. It's just how businesses operate. They only care when the consumer stops giving them money. So why post? I like debates. When I say I couldn't care less, I mean to how they price things. Do I think some things are a rip off? Yep. So I skipped out on most of them.

[Aniond]

Umm Don't buy it.

[Laerune]

SE sold few items and they saw that it was selling like hotcakes, so they tried adding other stuff like mounts and glamour outfits and they saw those items made them alot of money. So much money that they were able to fund both the new European and North America datacenter. So SE decided to increase the price of the popular type of items (glamour) and we the players kept buying them, they started to introduce emotes and we kept buying.

Like many have said, SE is a business, their goal is to make us hand in as much money as they are able, which is a normal thing for a company to do. Yes, SE could have added the glamour items, emotes, mounts .etc into the game as quest reward, trial reward, but why do this, if people have shown you, that they are willing to drop 18 dollars for a outfit? SE has to be bonkers to not take advantage of the players need to buy these items. Maybe if the playerbase as a collective did not buy anything from the Mog Station, only then maybe we would not have these items there, but this would not guarantee that those items would be added as a ingame reward.

During one of the Live Letters, someone asked Yoshida if there were plans to add Krile's Robe to the game. Yoshida basicly sad that the only way this item would be added is, if he knew it was going to be sold alot via the Mog Station. This is where we are with FFXIV.

[Belhi]

Where do you suppose the finances and resources necessary to create a cash shop came from in the first place? The artists and developers creating these items and the systems to support them had to be members of the XIV team or had to be trained to work with existing systems. This cost time and money that could have otherwise gone into producing an equivalent number of items in the game.

BUT IT WOULDN'T BECAUSE THE INVESTMENT WAS MADE WITH THE ASSUMPTION THAT IT WOULD TURN A PROFIT.

I might also point out that FF14's total revenue from subs at best is probably around 5% of SEs total revenue. Its hardly like FF14 funds everything else.

Seriously.. The money to pay for the staff to make these items would not have been allocated to make those items because such investments were made outside the budget allocated to FF14. They just wouldn't have been made. Likely if money is allocated to production of these items it involved the hiring of additional 3d model artists, which considering the growing size of the FF14 team, is likely. They would have hired more staff to accommodate the need for creation of items for the Cash shop.

So no, the money wouldn't have gone into making more in game items. We get what we pay for. They likely would have just hired less artists as the budget paying for staff for modelling would be less.

Say otherwise is just saying 'SE should cut into their profits to give us more stuff without any actual returns'. People like to call SE greedy over the Cash shop but the attitude that they should give more without any returns is just as greedy unless they are claiming that we aren't getting our value for money with in game content and models for their sub. Ask yourself this: Would you still be paying your sub and playing this game if the Cash shop and the items in it didn't exist? If the answer is yes (and if your subbed you would think the answer was yes) then you should have no issue with the cash shop because it is not effecting your purchase at all. You are getting what you paid for and they are dealing with you fairly.

[Zojha]

It may come across callous, but people assume large companies like Square, EA, Ubisoft and etc care about any of our feelings. They don't.

Neither do they care about morals - If companies could legally hold slaves, you can damn well be assured they would. Letterbox companies to shirk taxes are highly popular. Here in germany we got inland vessels that are registrated on Malta or even in south america. They don't even have a keel! Our weapon industry has been supplying armed conflicts and terrorists across the world for years. Where do you think they get those weapons from? They're not producing them themselves. The pharma industry has long since departed from basing their prices on production cost and instead look at just how much you're willing to pay to ease your suffering from a disease. And if you fail to bring the money, well, go and suffer. They're not shying away from letting people downright die either - sure, the treatment only costs a fraction of what it's priced, but if you give it to that guy cheap, everyone will want it for that price and that hurts profits.

The corporate world "is" appalling. Some markets more so than others, but they all are to some degree. I strongly advise against informing yourself if you don't want to become a cynic.

[Mishari]

These posts about prices are getting old. Just consolidate all of it into one post so I know which thread to avoid so I don't have to hear people complain about optional stuff they don't need to buy, thanks.

All this jabbering about it beeing optional is getting old.

[supreme]

i agree , SE is pushing it to far with all this
i could live with it that they sold some dyes , and past event items ( even though i feel like that takes away from long time players for a bit )

but starting to lock more and more emotes and shit behind the pay wall is bs , its a mmorpg its ment to be social and emotes are part of that

[Lycieus]

The money to pay for the staff to make these items would not have been allocated to make those items because such investments were made outside the budget allocated to FF14. They just wouldn't have been made.

So I've had cash shop defenders tell me that I have no idea how the funds for these were allocated. This is why my original post included a statement about resources, and the fact that people making assets for the cash shop would need to be trained on XIV systems, requiring time etc. This is not refutable.

The point regarding money on the other hand... is a double-edged sword. You can't claim that the investments were within the xiv budget and not outside of it, just as I can't claim the opposite. You don't know if they would have been financed otherwise.

[Alleo]

How many times does it have to be repeated to get through the cement block you call your skull: The cash shop stuff is completely seperate from the game. Your 15 a month does -not- go towards cash shop items, they are self-funded. If the cash shop disappeared tomorrow morning you still would not see those items in game.

Wow why do you feel the need to insult someone personally? How about writing your arguments without that?

And we only know that because SE said so..its not like they already lied to us or changed things in the past. So yes a company that gets subscriptions money and at the same time uses the cash shop quite a lot of times (I did post a comparison between WoW and FF14 and I am quite sure that FF14 would win with a big gap even if we do not count all the seasonal stuff in there) will have to try to convince us that this is not greedy at all. And the good thing is: They do not need to show us numbers and things like that so we can never ever be sure to say that its the truth or not. So seeing how they already said things that went completely different later..well I will not go around and believe everything they say, especially if its about money.

Kinda funny that its often said that the cash shop will help the game, yet we get less content in 4.0 after comparing it to 3.0 and now even one dungeon less too. I really see how the cash shop helps us..I really do..and even if its only there to fund itself, why do they need so many high prices? The seasonal stuff is already in the game so nothing new was created there yet the prices of the housing items are way to high, especially since some are destroyed if you remove them..if its only about giving players the chance to buy it again why have such prices?

And Lycieus makes a good argument too: All those people that are designing exclusive outfits and new mounts will do probably only for the cash shop or a huge amount of time for it. (We already know that it takes months to create an outfit) So people are waiting quite a lot of time to finally have their bunny male set. We already complained enough about the reskins of some dungeon gear and so on. All these people that are working on the cash shop might get paid by the cash shop itself (who knows) but the time and energy could have been put into the game itself.

Really in the end nobody knows if its true or not and I am not going around and say that everything SE says is a lie. But IMO the prices and frequency of the cash shop update really gives me the feeling of greed so I will not take the word for that.

@Belhi: But the cash shop is a problem for all of those that are collectors. Be it glamour, mount, pets and more because simply cant get those by playing the game. So yes even if nobody is forced to buy it, it still feels bad since you might want that mount/pet and cant ever get it because you are not willing or simply cant pay for those extras. You say that we should not go around and assume that they are not truthful about that yet we should believe that none of those cash shop items would have been made ingame? Also lets see: in the past you were able to get every old event item when it comes around the next time. After the cash shop it will now be only available with real life money. There was absolutely no reason for them to put it into the cash shop after they already had it on an NPCs in the past. We also got item restrictions on the event stuff so people could not sell them too..all of this to sell them for real money. More and more stuff also gets "one character only" instead of being account bound while the prices are getting higher.

Do you really see no problem here? Even after we see that we got no new race in SB, one job less and now even one dungeon less in uneven patches with only some promises of getting other content instead.

As a customer that pays quite the money for this game this really just feels bad.