What are you paying a subscription for?

[Avoidy]

Just a genuine question to all the players out there.

You are paying ~$112 per patch (Almost triple that if you have max retainers).

For the price of a full AAA title, is the content that XIV offers you in a single patch worth its subscription cost?

Personally i would say no, its not.
I have the maximum retainers addition, and it costs me ~$350 per patch to say subscribed to XIV, that is the cost of 4 full priced AAA new release games, for what is around a month, maybe two, worth of content.
After realizing this, i can't in good faith keep throwing money at a product that isn't receiving enough attention by its developers, player numbers between major patches fluctuate to the point where the game becomes basically unplayable in places like Materia.

So what do you spend your $112+ on per patch cycle?


EDIT: Seems i was wrong here, patches are 4 months, just feels like 8.
So i guess thats still $220/patch which is still pretty bad for the content that is released.

There's a niche group I enjoy spending time with occasionally and this game is how we do that. I'd say it's 50/50 between the community I've met while playing it, and my house. If either went away, I'd just unsub on the spot.
There's also the vague hope that the future variant/alliance raid content will be enjoyable. I don't play many games or do much expensive stuff for entertainment, so the 15 a month isn't a big deal to me from a financial perspective. But from a principle standpoint it's huge how they basically do nothing for 4 months and ask for a subscription out of it. Idk, I'm hella mixed on it.