Is Square losing Money due to 3rd party tool usage?

[CelestiCer]

" No " Think of the following tools being denied... If you know you know.

• Mare/Pen/Glam plugins for character modding
• Anam posing and anything NSFW ERP nudity
• Non-combat QOL plugins
• Universalis and the Marketboard plugin
• ACT stops working. FFlogs activity drops
• All QOL Raid tools. Raiding activity drops
• BurningDownTheHouse for Housing decoration
• Technically Gshade approved by Yoshi

And many more tools, if Square made a mandate to truly put their foot down and deny all of it instead of shaking their finger? Square could lose subscribers who love using them and Square knows this.


Players create upgrades and fixes " That Square Won't "
It costs money to fix or implement anything, letting players do it themselves is free. Think of the recent " 6.31 Ninja Mudra bug Fix ", made in less then a week vs Square not implementing a fix in weeks. XIVAlex or NoClippy, to help players with bad pings. Hrothgar hair issues, customized glamours, Body modifications etc... players will fix and upgrade any part of the game themselves. Square not tackling all of this? is a sign that they aren't losing money at all to Third-party tools which is the bottom-line of a Company.


What matters more to Square is " Losing Face "
Blatant usage/advertisement of third-party-tools gets hammered. Raiding-tools, addressed with a public letter, yet the Billboard debacle nor the continuous sharing/selling/usage of Mods and NSFW material isn't addressed as directly and openly ever. I'm sure for good reasons, because this all could sadden the Yacht owning NFT promoting executives, passionate Developers and Yoshi. Having players clear Ultimate content that was so hard to make through cheating? obviously sucks.


What should Square do about " Third-Party tools? "
Denying is a loss of subscribers and money. Denying 1 part over another? creates division in the player-base due to favoritism. Then again if that division isn't costing them money? the Executives probably wouldn't give a S*ht. The best thing they could do is to implement as many QOL changes to upgrade the FFXIV experience without it going against how they intended the game to be played. Both Square and the players know playing FFXIV with third party tools is like playing it on crack regardless of what content or what activity the players decide to do.

-- Then again this is my Hot-take --
Do you think Square is losing money
due to 3rd party tool usage?

[Corrupted]

While I don't like assuming and pointing fingers, if I had to take a guess I would say this is some roundabout way of putting the names upfront to give it more attention. But then again, I highly doubt anyone really reads these posts, anyone that matters that is...

Overthinking things aside, what was said already in different threads still holds true (I guess):
If they decide to take action, it will likely be a wide sweep covering everything. They won't pick & choose since that will just create more work and that's a big no-no for them... I think.
It's either that or slowly adding whatever is deemed useful by whatever means they use as an in-game feature fashionably late.

[CelestiCer]

Also got reminded via the Balance Discord, where mods are being created for free that require certain gear pieces to be worn for them to work. For some retain it's exclusivity to a degree? it's sometimes linked to a Mog-station Item file. Which encourages players to then buy Mog-station items which I find kinda ironic.

[Absimiliard]

They are most likely gaining rather than losing. The reality is that third-party tools brought in some people that might never have played the game at all without the ability to change its aesthetics to their liking. This same demographic is known to spend quite a bit of money on Mogstation items. These same tools have also helped to retain people from various other demographics that would probably have left by now.

[hagare]

" No " Think of the following tools being denied... If you know you know.

• Mare/Pen/Glam plugins for character modding
• Anam posing and anything NSFW ERP nudity
• Non-combat QOL plugins
• Universalis and the Marketboard plugin
• ACT stops working. FFlogs activity drops
• All QOL Raid tools. Raiding activity drops
• BurningDownTheHouse for Housing decoration
• Technically Gshade approved by Yoshi

And many more tools, if Square made a mandate to truly put their foot down and deny all of it instead of shaking their finger? Square could lose subscribers who love using them and Square knows this.


Players create upgrades and fixes " That Square Won't "
It costs money to fix or implement anything, letting players do it themselves is free. Think of the recent " 6.31 Ninja Mudra bug Fix ", made in less then a week vs Square not implementing a fix in weeks. XIVAlex or NoClippy, to help players with bad pings. Hrothgar hair issues, customized glamours, Body modifications etc... players will fix and upgrade any part of the game themselves. Square not tackling all of this? is a sign that they aren't losing money at all to Third-party tools which is the bottom-line of a Company.


What matters more to Square is " Losing Face "
Blatant usage/advertisement of third-party-tools gets hammered. Raiding-tools, addressed with a public letter, yet the Billboard debacle nor the continuous sharing/selling/usage of Mods and NSFW material isn't addressed as directly and openly ever. I'm sure for good reasons, because this all could sadden the Yacht owning NFT promoting executives, passionate Developers and Yoshi. Having players clear Ultimate content that was so hard to make through cheating? obviously sucks.


What should Square do about " Third-Party tools? "
Denying is a loss of subscribers and money. Denying 1 part over another? creates division in the player-base due to favoritism. Then again if that division isn't costing them money? the Executives probably wouldn't give a S*ht. The best thing they could do is to implement as many QOL changes to upgrade the FFXIV experience without it going against how they intended the game to be played. Both Square and the players know playing FFXIV with third party tools is like playing it on crack regardless of what content or what activity the players decide to do.

-- Then again this is my Hot-take --
Do you think Square is losing money
due to 3rd party tool usage?

now think about the console players who can't use mods.

[Saraide]

I dont think they're losing any noticeable amounts of money. This isnt a free to play game where boosters are a much bigger deal. SE already got the money of people using mods through sub fees. If anything people fixing problems they have with the game with mods is increasing their enjoyment, potentially keeping them subbed for longer.

[Raikai]

Can you imagine how many players would quit if that "FFlogs parsing game" would cease to exist? Tons of people literally live to achieve bragging rights with high percetiles.

[kevin_satron]

the devs is pretty much can't do anything with it

[NekoMataMata]

Honestly, this is the only way they'll ever do anything about mods, although it'll probably end up being an all or nothing situation...

I think mare will eventually push them into that situation though. Eventually it'll become a situation of why buy cosmetics on the mogstore when you can install mare, sync with a bunch of other people and have a lot more options.

I'm already at the point where I feel that mare has gone too far, and if all the people posting on the forums about inclusivity actually cared about inclusivity, then they'd probably feel the same way.

I have a hope that eventually mare will evolve to the point where there'll be public servers that people can join for all the cosmetic mods they're wearing to show up to others on the same server, and that it'll get popular enough that new players are advocated to use that instead of bothering with in-game glam. Then SE will definitely take action.

[Espon]

The issue is more cheats and bots that are the problem. Most things are just cosmetics or making designing houses easier and have no effect on revenue (in fact it might even increase it slightly as some RPers only stay subbed because of the modding community). Bots on the other hand cost the company money as they use stolen accounts or fraudulent credit cards.

Instead of trying to find where to draw the line, it's easier for them to say all third party programs that use or manipulates the game's data is against the ToS.