Why is the Cruise Chaser mount from the Mogstation?

[technole]

It was a very old live letter from 2014 when he first introduced the optional items shop and that all revenue goes back into the game.

I guess some forgot the recent 14-hour broadcast last month when he said they were willing to pay above market rates for new servers because of the chip shortages. Now some have the nerve to go nuts over $29 mount that's been par for the course for a two-seater since 2016 with the fat mog.

2016, your saltiness is late. But that's okay a lot of people are buying and that's all that matters.

[Acece]

It was a very old live letter from 2014 when he first introduced the optional items shop and that all revenue goes back into the game.

I guess some forgot the recent 14-hour broadcast last month when he said they were willing to pay above market rates for new servers because of the chip shortages. Now some have the nerve to go nuts over $29 mount that's been par for the course for a two-seater since 2016 with the fat mog.

2016, your saltiness is late. But that's okay a lot of people are buying and that's all that matters.

I mean I guess, I doubt they're going to lose money getting new servers with how many people are coming into the game for endwalker (heck with this mount alone they probably got enough for servers).

[TwistedTea]

It was a very old live letter from 2014 when he first introduced the optional items shop and that all revenue goes back into the game.
I guess some forgot the recent 14-hour broadcast last month when he said they were willing to pay above market rates for new servers because of the chip shortages.

Yoshi P also said that:

In older MMOs, such as Ultima Online, there was a house maintenance fee you had to pay weekly, but in FFXIV: ARR we decided against this system. Similarly, these older MMOs also had a system where your house would break down if you didn’t log in after a while in order to have you continue your subscription, but this is a thing of the past and we won't have any system like that.

And yet here we are with our present housing system.

Do we have clear evidence that all the Mog Station money goes back to the game to this date?

[Illy_Peridot]

People always mention the interview, but I've never actually seen a direct source for it or an article or anything about it, Just peoples memories and guesstimates to when it was, I'd love to actually SEE it. I wanna believe people at face value, but twitter actively teaches me otherwise.

It was a very old live letter from 2014 when he first introduced the optional items shop and that all revenue goes back into the game.

I did as much digging as humanly possible to look into this and couldn't find anything more than what was said at the first EU Fanfest in 2014 (timestamped, and the talk goes on for like 4 minutes about this). Nothing is said about all profits from the optional items will be put back into the game, but it is stated that the funds can be used to put more into the game. I recommend watching it since my paraphrasing isn't that great.

[Phantasmal]

I can't say I'm the biggest fan of Cruise Chaser being on the Mog Station. Considering how objectively iconic it is, having representation in a raid tier, an ultimate, and a PvP game mode, it's disappointing to have it not locked behind some in-game achievement. And it's not like Square was strapped for places to put it. It could have been a reward for clearing TEA, A11S or A12S MINE/Unreal, or playing/winning X number of games in Rival Wings. And those are just the places that are directly related to it. It could have even been tied to something like the Omega Blue raids, or fun new line of quests where you rebuild Alexander bosses to ride as mounts. Any of these would have done the mount more (brute) justice than just being a credit card swipe away. But that's just the romantic in me trying to give some pixels on the screen some emotional value.

I also feel like they could have done just a bit more for this mount if they were going to charge us $30 for it. I understand that $30 is the standard for 2-seaters, but considering this mount was almost entirely a repurposed asset, and an extremely popular one at that, I don't think it's unreasonable to have hoped it would have come with a little more pizzazz. There are so many cool animations and attacks that Cruise Chaser is known for: Alpha Sword, Limit Cut, Laser X-Sword, Hawk Blaster, Whirlwind, any of these could have made the mount so much more interesting, without requiring a ton of extra effort from the team (assumedly. I am no game designer.) Cruise Chaser not being able to (harmlessly) cut something in front of it is like a Morbol not being able to use Bad Breath.

I won't pretend I know what's best, nor will I try to tell what the folks over at SE should be doing with their game. All I can say is that from my perspective, the implementation of this mount was just... lame. I hope the folks who buy it end up enjoying it; Cruise Chaser really holds a special place in my heart. All I can hope is that if they choose to do this sort of thing again, that they try to go the extra mile and make something worth 2 months of sub feel more substantial.

[StriderShinryu]

[B]All I can say is that from my perspective, the implementation of this mount was just... lame.

Very well said.

I think my biggest takeaway from all of this is largely the same. It's just kind of.. disappointing, on multiple levels. I can understand having the cash shop and basically how it operates. I can see also see how many players, myself included would have rather seen the mount made available in some way through the game itself (even though I would personally never use the mount anyway). Heck, we do have The Rising anniversary event coming up shortly too. Whether you care about the mount being in the shop or not, however, I think we should all be able to see that there's clearly a lot of hard feelings here. And that needs to be addressed either in a live letter or a Q&A or in one of YoshiP's developer blog posts. It won't make everyone happy but he needs to break things down just like he did for the server capacity and upgrade issue. Arguing amongst ourselves with nothing but feelings and remembered mentions from years in the past isn't getting anyone anywhere.

[Bellsong]

Yeah I've been digging through live letters from 2014, so far I've found the introduction of fantasias (XIV), the introduction of eternal bond (also XIV), rogue/ninja(XIV as well I think?)... I've not seen anything, even in chatter translations of Yoshi-p mentioning mog station sales go directly to the game. Does literally anyone have a source? even a fan translation linking to the which live letter it was or interview had this mentioned? It's really not enough these days to just say "Oh, X was said so that's how it is" when that could very well have been something mistranslated, mistaken or misheard, but it's spread and said so much that everyone just takes it at face value. I'm going to keep digging myself and will update if I find anything, but if anyone remembers a specific live letter and not just a vague year, that'd be great

[Dionysius]

6 months later, YoRHa (Flight Unit) will be available from Mogstation for $40.
Titan Cart from E4 will be 4-seater mount for $50.
Meanwhile in the game, Yokai Watch event is returning, with brand new mount. Golden Whisper A-go-go!

[ForteNightshade]

I'm not sure what more proof you need other than deliberately creating a separate team, to create cash shop items. They are literally taking away talent, that could otherwise be used on the development team.

Would you prefer to pay $80 per expansion and $20-25 sub fees instead? Because how else do you think Square Enix will justify the costs to develop content? Video game development costs have risen exponentially throughout the years. For reference sake, FFXV reportedly cost $600,000,000 million. To point that into perspective, at $80 for per game, FFXV needed to sell 7.5M copies world wide just to break even. It didn't... but was financially successful according to SE. How? DLC and micro-transactions.

What this boils down to are three options. Customers either accept drastically higher prices at retail, micro-transactions or the overall quality of games brought down to manage cost because no corporation is just going to eat costs like this.

[Dionysius]

Would you prefer to pay $80 per expansion and $20-25 sub fees instead? Because how else do you think Square Enix will justify the costs to develop content? Video game development costs have risen exponentially throughout the years. For reference sake, FFXV reportedly cost $600,000,000 million. To point that into perspective, at $80 for per game, FFXV needed to sell 7.5M copies world wide just to break even. It didn't... but was financially successful according to SE. How? DLC and micro-transactions.

What this boils down to are three options. Customers either accept drastically higher prices at retail, micro-transactions or the overall quality of games brought down to manage cost because no corporation is just going to eat costs like this.

I think most people missed the point on the outrage from Cruise Chaser.
SQEX won't get into this much trouble if it's any other mount that players won't feel that much attachment (optional).
Cruise Chaser is important for some players and they feel "forced" to buy it.
Some people ok with spending more money on top of subscription, some don't, but both sides being persuaded heavily to get it.