New ways to monetize the game through customization.

[Deveryn]

Support the game? You realise that FF14 is their money earner that is funding everything else.

Plenty of other MMOs survived quite fine on subs alone for many years. World Of warcraft, EVE online... The games that failed with subs are the ones that didn't retain a large enough audience after release. Two games that spring to mind were Lord Of the Rings Online and Star Wars The Old Republic that both did better going F2P since the games on release flopped and lost all the audience. Best way to get players back into the game was making it free to enter.

FF14 is the former which has such a huge audience despite it being subscription only that it's actually churning out money for SE. Without ff14, SE would be long dead. So this isn't even about supporting the game, it's just about making SE shareholders richer lol. I honestly can't believe the mentality in this thread that you are looking for and supporting more ways to make rich people richer. Your mentality only hurts the consumer at the end of the day as companies look for more and more ways to make extra money for those shareholder dividends.

SE is certainly not some indie company that is working their asses off to release and update their games with nothing but dust in their bank accounts. They didn't even invest in new servers when they could have early last year (when it was only a 6 month wait for servers and networking gear) when the player population was increasing which resulted in lost sales as they had to halt all sales of FF14 over one of the best periods for games sales (Christmas) on top of the massive queues to login.

They won't even invest in more servers to support more wards for housing, hence why we have a massive housing crisis in the game.

Nor will they increase investment into the game. Where's the Hrothgar females? We only recently got the males for viera. Where's all the wearable head slot items for Viera and Hrothgar? SE could literally hire a few extra artists to spend their time going back through all the gear and making it compatible with viera and Hrothgar, but they won't even do that.

And you guys think they deserve even more money? Absolute joke.

I didn't say anything about anyone deserving money or us supporting. I was talking in terms of FFXIV as a business entity securing funds for itself to support further development and expansion.

You need to get your facts straight. It was last year that we saw 6 wards added per division / subdivision. Japan and EU got new servers and NA is getting more in a two phase operation. There's a housing crisis because they had their own idea of how to do housing and it didn't work out when the game actually got popular.

That's all I'm gonna respond to. The only absolute joke around here is your response.

[SturmChurro]

Its been on going for years. Its actually their lack of action that has people getting in on it more and more everyday. Also if SE did something about it, the game community wouldn't sit quietly about it when RMT bots and other things are running rampant.

I'm sure SE is shaking in their boots, because a few people will continue to whine endlessly about the bots in the walls.

[ForteNightshade]

Frankly I'm sure that even if they did worse than that the community would still be there
Just be realistic, gamers nowadays are not respected and it's normal since we accept to pay no matter how we are treated

The reality is without some form of micro-transactions, the box price of games would have increased substantially due to the cost of development nowadays. Keep in mind, said box price stayed the same through four entire console generations; only recently increasing by $10 with the PS5 and Series X.

So our options are an opt-in system where we can choose what we want while still playing the game or everyone pays more regardless. I prefer the former. Of course, companies have long taken advantage of this through crappy practices but the concept of DLC or some additional cosmetics is how they offset costs. The biggest fantasy a lot of people have with regards to the Mogstation, specifically, is if it didn't exist then then all that content would be put into the game through standard quests or achievement when in actuality, they simply wouldn't make it in the first place.

Now I'm not saying I agree with the OP's suggestion or anything. Just that the whole idea of blaming micro-transactions on the customers accepting them is flawed. Companies like Capcom have openly and publicly acknowledged if it weren't for DLC, they'd have jacked up the prices of their games. Hell, the CEO of Capcom said he feels games should be $150-200. Which is absurd but goes to show you just how they think.

I will never forget for example the moment when the developer of battlefield 5 told the players that if they were not happy they could not buy the game and that they had no value in his eyes, the players got angry but in the end they paid

Umm... no they didn't. Battlefield V was among the lowest selling game in the franchise's history and the lead director was fired, if I recall, because of that statement. People didn't buy the game, which is why it flopped so hard.

In November, it was reported that Battlefield V sold fewer than half the physical copies that Battlefield 1 did upon its launch during the same period of time.[43] The game sold 7.3 million copies by the end of 2018. On February 5, 2019, EA's CEO Andrew Wilson announced that the game ultimately failed to meet sales expectations, blaming the game's marketing as well as their focus on developing a single-player campaign instead of a battle royale mode, a genre which had gained recent widespread popularity. Wilson also highlighted Battlefield V's long development cycle, and release in a month of strong competition. EA's stock prices also faced its worst drop in more than a decade during its third quarter of the fiscal year, declining by around 18 percent, which EA attributed in part to the poor sales of the game.[44][45][46]

In Japan, the PlayStation 4 version of Battlefield V sold 110,653 during its first week of release, placing it at number four on the all format sales chart.[47]

Battlefield V was a financial disaster for EA.

SE can take it all down too if they wanted to, so these modders are running on thin ice. If there is one thing that will force SE into action it's this.

No, it won't. A good chunk of these people only play FFXIV because of mods. SE would lose significantly more going after modders and third party plugins. Hence why they ignore them entirely unless something is blatantly brought to their attention. The whole Ultimate drama was a perfect example of them making a momentary stink about it to make it seem like they care then everything going back to exactly how it's always been. To give you specifics, the estimated amount of people using mods and third party stuff exceeds 300,000 active players based on unique downloads of the popular programs. If even just 50,000 quit should they be banned, that loss of monthly revenue is more than anything those people would buy off the Mogstation.

There's a reason mods and things like ACT have never been banned. And it isn't because the devs are simply being nice. It's because it's more profitable to let them all exist in a grey area.

[Packetdancer]

As someone who used to work in the games industry, I'm actually not averse to the idea of a cosmetics shop. Selling outfits, mounts, whatever... I'm okay with having people who want to buy that stuff help to further fund the game's development. Heck, I have enough disposable income at this point in my life that I'm happy enough to be that person if there's something I really want.

As others have said, the cost of game development has gone up astronomically; I may not work in the industry any longer (for a variety of reasons, mostly "crunch time and omnipresent background sexism sapped my will to live"), but I still talk to a whooooole lot of friends who are. And I still do game development on my own time; I can attest even just the tools I use as an independent developer have skyrocketed in cost in many areas, much less the sort of stuff entailed in full commercial AAA game dev.

(Albeit with a few pleasant exceptions; Quixel Mixer being free still gives me joy.)

However...

And statues should be merely pretty statues not extremely expensive emotes.

I'm definitely in agreement with this.

I get that this game has a long history of tying in-game items to real-world purchases. Buy a stuffed carbuncle, get a carbuncle minion. Buy a soundtrack, get an orchestrion roll or minion in game. And to some extent, I don't really mind that; buying a soundtrack album and getting an in-game orchestrion roll as a bonus seems a nice perk. (Especially as generally it's an album-specific version of a track that already exists as an orchestrion obtainable in-game.)

But the emotes with the statues are a far cry from an orchestrion roll you get with a relatively-affordable soundtrack; they're very flashy, and precisely the sort of "prestige" thing people would grind in-game to obtain.

I bought the Omega statue because I love those raids, and I am very happy to have the statue here on my desk. (I am also very very glad that they fixed the production quality problems with said statues before mine shipped.) And I do also love the emotes that came with that statue, don't get me wrong. But it's kind of lame that other people who want them would've had to pay quite a bit for a statue that they maybe didn't want just to get the emotes that they did want.

And this is only exacerbated by the fact that the statues quickly go out of stock entirely, potentially for very, very long times. If you want Odin's Zantetsuken emote, even if you're willing to buy the statue to get it, you don't have that option any longer. Same with the emotes for any of the other statues.

And while I don't really want any of the other statues -- maybe Shiva, given the Heavensward story -- I would have happily done something stupidly grindy in-game to get that Zantetsuken emote if I had the option.

I mean, I hate when there's something you find in-game that you realize you can't get because you weren't playing during a specific time when that thing was available to get in-game. (Witness people looking at Garo stuff before they were able to negotiate the return of the Garo tie-in event. Or people who couldn't get the FFXV Regalia mount because they started playing after the event was held. Or anyone looking at PvP seasonal mounts that haven't been available for like... 4 years, or whatever.)

It's even worse if it's something you now can't get and would have had to pay real money for even if you could. That's the sort of thing to induce the worst type of FOMO mindset -- the thought that "if I don't spend this money now, I won't be able to get the thing I want ever."

That's just yikes on a lot of levels.

[SturmChurro]

No, it won't. A good chunk of these people only play FFXIV because of mods. SE would lose significantly more going after modders and third party plugins. Hence why they ignore them entirely unless something is blatantly brought to their attention. The whole Ultimate drama was a perfect example of them making a momentary stink about it to make it seem like they care then everything going back to exactly how it's always been. To give you specifics, the estimated amount of people using mods and third party stuff exceeds 300,000 active players based on unique downloads of the popular programs. If even just 50,000 quit should they be banned, that loss of monthly revenue is more than anything those people would buy off the Mogstation.

There's a reason mods and things like ACT have never been banned. And it isn't because the devs are simply being nice. It's because it's more profitable to let them all exist in a grey area.

Paid mods. If people make it a problem it could force SE to take down paid mods. That is the context. People will continue to play anyway, even if they went after much of the mods. Let's be real. I do like how the modding community thinks they have so much power though.

[Syln]

100% agree, FOMO is one of the worst thing used by a video game company to retain players.

[SturmChurro]

100% agree, FOMO is one of the worst thing used by a video game company to retain players.

I hate it. Unfortunately, it seems to be the latest trend for every game. I'll watch devs acting like their "new" monetization scheme is so much better. Including fortnite style battle passes and the like. All FOMO.

[Packetdancer]

I hate it. Unfortunately, it seems to be the latest trend for every game. I'll watch devs acting like their "new" monetization scheme is so much better. Including fortnite style battle passes and the like. All FOMO.

If your "battle pass" is a "you pay once and everything we come out with during the duration of this pass, you get" system -- e.g., season passes that come with "any and all DLC we come out with" and such -- I'm inclined to like it somewhat more -- or at least, hate it somewhat less -- than actively "here's a Cool Thing! Don't you want the Cool Thing? Better buy the Cool Thing right now, or you'll never see it again!" followed by, three weeks later, "Here's the Cool Thing with new, better colors! Don't you prefer this Cool Thing? Better buy it right now, or..."

But if your "battle pass" is "you need to pay us money in order to be eligible at all for any rewards you would earn in-game during this period", then your entire business model is bad and you should feel bad.

If you make things I earn in-game dependent on paying you real money and earning those things in game, I will stop playing. It's even worse if you make earning those things in-game become gambling a'la loot boxes. I bailed on Secret World Legends after having been a loyal player of The Secret World from beta -- having a Grandmaster lifetime subscription and all -- because they started dropping in-world loot boxes from mobs that you had to pay real money to get keys to open, and which you had no idea what they might contain. And that was a hard pass from me. (Despite the fact that, as a holder of one of those legacy lifetime subscriptions, they threw a large number of those keys at me per month.)

I will pay for extra content. I will grind for extra content. I will not pay you (beyond any applicable subscription fee to the game in general) for extra content which I must then also grind for.

[Raoabolic]

I hate it. Unfortunately, it seems to be the latest trend for every game. I'll watch devs acting like their "new" monetization scheme is so much better. Including fortnite style battle passes and the like. All FOMO.

Let's be real, if this game is going to go off the deep end (if it hasn't for you already, lol) then I would say them introducing a WoW token like item to the cash shop would be the final nail. They can milk those types of sales via expansions.

[SturmChurro]

...

Regardless of if it's pay to get more, or play to earn all ("free"). You still are forced to play during specific periods, seasonally, otherwise you miss out. These games conveniently allow you to pay a large premium to unlock everything without the need to play during this period. I would rather not play these games altogether. Every game has their own passes nowadays, there are too many to keep up with, and it leads to burn out.

Let's be real, if this game is going to go off the deep end (if it hasn't for you already, lol) then I would say them introducing a WoW token like item to the cash shop would be the final nail. They can milk those types of sales via expansions.

WoW token would be worthless as gil is largely worthless. It would definitely be one of the worst things they could add to the game though.