This is just appalling

[Vespar]

£11. £11 for two glamour items. Over £10 for two pieces of virtual clothing. £4 to have your character act like a Miqo'te and flail your arms around. It isn't even account wide. A standard sub to play the game with 40 characters is £8.99.

I bought a car! Therefore all my gas should be free!

[Ama_Hamada]

I bought a car! Therefore all my gas should be free!

If you wanna go that route.

If SE was a mechanic shop, they would be the only shop in your country. You bring in your car to have it fixed and they tac on an extra charge of charging you for storing the parts needed to repair the car. Then they would or could paint it for a cheap price but you have to come back every week to get it repainted.

[Lycieus]

Yes I can because I understand how accounting works (its what I am trained at)

Awesome. I'm trained in software development.

Even then IF, and this is a big IF, they did have the cash shop times created from FF14's budget then that budget would have been allocated taking into consideration earnings from the cash shop meaning that without the cash shops earnings FF14's budget would have been reduced as the cost of developing cash shop items would have increased the amount of funds allocated to the game.

Simply put your sub isn't paying for those items. If your not buying them off the cash shop you haven't paid for them.

Nothing you've said demonstrates that. Why would Square carve out an entirely separate budget for cash shop items, especially since they are using members of the FFXIV dev team to create those assets in the first place?

[PotatoTree]

When you have a cash shop, you suddenly have a conflict of interest. For every item made, person hired, or unit of time spent on development, there will always be some bean counter that's asking "can we allocate this to the cash shop?" thus removing content from the game that we payed for through subscription.

The only things that should be in the cash shop are administrative things (race change, name change, etc), and things you can acquire in game (old event items). That at least encourages the devs to make cool event items, in hopes of selling them when the event is over.

[Belhi]

Awesome. I'm trained in software development.

Nothing you've said demonstrates that. Why would Square carve out an entirely separate budget for cash shop items, especially since they are using members of the FFXIV dev team to create those assets in the first place?

Because it makes it easier to track revenue streams vs expenses in the book keeping. Yoshi P has outright said that cash shop items have to forecast to make enough money to pay for their own development or they don't get developed and he doesn't make that call. That means the resources used to pay for the creation of those items is paid for by those items. Project management would tie into this since allocation of man hours needed for development of projects would be used to calculate how much staff will be needed to produce the desired products. That is what scheduling is. The additional hours needed to produce the cash shop items would be factored into that when hiring and maintaining staff on the project. The expenses, calculated probably in man hours, would then be allocated to their projects and their respective budgets.

Now that isn't 100% for sure how they would do it but considering what we know of how they greenlight cash shop projects, that is the model that would make sense. Just throwing everything into the FF14 budget expenses would make cost analysis and profit and loss reports for cash shop items very difficult and it would be hard to calculate the profit they provided. That information is essential in business planning and in some cases legally required under accounting standards so accurate reports can be produced for regulators and shareholders.

When you have a cash shop, you suddenly have a conflict of interest. For every item made, person hired, or unit of time spent on development, there will always be some bean counter that's asking "can we allocate this to the cash shop?" thus removing content from the game that we payed for through subscription.

The only things that should be in the cash shop are administrative things (race change, name change, etc), and things you can acquire in game (old event items). That at least encourages the devs to make cool event items, in hopes of selling them when the event is over.

There is no Bean counter saying that because it would make their job a lot harder. Bean counters like clearly stated expense and revenue paired off so things can be tracked much easier. Particularly when tax comes into the picture. Combined with what we know about their forecasting and green lighting of development of cash shop items we know its outright untrue. You wouldn't be getting any of the non-seasonal items in game without the cash shop because they never would have been developed in the first place.

[Lunaxia]

I bought a car! Therefore all my gas should be free!

I bought a car. Why does the petrol cost more than the car itself?

[Vespar]

You guys really cant get over this can you? There are dozens of threads regarding the cash shop, but the simple fact remains, its all vanity items and SE can charge what they want for that. It doesnt break the game to have added cash shop items and If you think about it, its already cheaper or on par with other cash shop/microtransactions. You also know exactly what its going to cost you and you will get exactly what u paid for unlike loot chests like in Overwatch, etc.
ESO has a cash shop, and I see costumes there going for 5-$10. Their mounts cost anywhere from $9-$40. Blizzard's Shop, a minion for $10, mounts for $25. Square Enix is not doing anything differently that other MMO companies aren't.
Sources:
Blizzard's Shop
ESO's Shop

There's nothing for players to discuss except to whine that they want it cheaper or free. Well guess what, SE is a business and they can charge for added services like any other business. They clearly are not going to stop doing something that generates them profit and also keeps this game going. Enough whining already. Either buy it or don't. Its as simple as that.

[Lycieus]

Now that isn't 100% for sure how they would do it but considering what we know of how they greenlight cash shop projects, that is the model that would make sense. Just throwing everything into the FF14 budget expenses would make cost analysis and profit and loss reports for cash shop items very difficult and it would be hard to calculate the profit they provided. That information is essential in business planning and in some cases legally required under accounting standards so accurate reports can be produced for regulators and shareholders.

None of this work needs be done if there is no cash shop.

[Alleo]

Blizzard's Shop
ESO's Shop

You know whats also interesting? That WoW started their cash shop one year earlier than SE and a long way into their game cycle too, yet they have barely anything in there! Compare this with SE cash shop, that has way more items in this even excluding all the seasonal stuff. I also would be kinda interested in knowing when WoW updated their cash shop the last time and how often they do that.

About the prices: Yes every mount in WoW costs more than our mounts but unlike a lot of our mounts they are all account bound. Lets say I have four alts in WoW I will pay the price for the mount once. If I have the same amount of alts in FF14 I will have to buy it four times. Suddenly its more expensive in FF14. If you only play one character than it will be cheaper but the question remains: Why make those mounts that are at the same time often just reskins of existing ones character bound? Why not account bound?

Lets not forget that you can earn all the Wow items by playing the game since you can simply buy the currency through ingame coins. Heck you can even buy playtime through ingame coins..nothing like that is possible in FF14

Also another problem is: SE prices vary a lot, especially for mounts and glamour stuff. WoW has the same prices for each category so you will know what to expect. Yet we have cash shop glamour including the hair which is cheaper than a two-pieces set without hair. How does that make sense?

And why do they have to charge so much for the seasonal stuff? One cant use the argument of "its created only for cash shop so they need to earn money" because those were ingame event items, so they already existed before they were put into the cash shop thus no extra money was needed for that step. Yet the items cost quite a bit and are one single piece too..why not make the price something like 0.50 €? You will give people the chance to get them again (even though they could have easily put them ingame..) and you might earn a little bit with each sold item..the prices right now are just pure greed..wanting that amount of money for an old seasonal item that can even be destroyed in some cases..

Big question on those that are growing sick of such threads: Why are you even posting in it? Why not just simply ignore it? You are not forced to read through that so why feel the need to take your time to post something, thus keeping the thread alive too?

Since SE is a business I will look forward to them putting stuff in there that some might consider Pay to win. I dont care about that stuff so its fine right? Lets sell houses there too since its nothing for endgame. Its not like people have different goals about their games thus someone might have glamours/pets/mounts as their ingame goal which they cant reach if they dont pay further money. But heck its only stuff with stats that is a no go right?

I mean in the end it could be worse right? Next to not getting the event items ingame the next time the event start, they could have taken away the rights to sell those items on the MB or even take away the function to be purchased again or swapped for the other gender...oh wait..

[Vespar]

Snip

Well you can't say I didn't try to stop them from getting themselves in a tizzy over something that wont change so long as SE keeps bringing in the dough on Mogstation...
but go ahead, gripe and moan for 40 more threads with 40 more pages each.

The rest of us will be enjoying SB and our cool mogstation items that the whiners wont ever have because they're too busy doing what they do best.
*offers lozenge*