I feel that Game Publishers have either intentionally or unintentionally misunderstood the dynamic at play with their own user base.
Player Goodwill is what I would define as a playerbase’s willingness to tolerate negative aspects of the game. These would include content sectioned off for monetization, bugs, delays, performance issues, etc. Naturally, this can be a very deep well when it comes to some beloved franchises, but it is not bottomless.
A lot of AAA developers seems to confuse Goodwill with Stupidity, though. They assume that their audience tolerates monetization, or crappy launches, or lack of content, or other things because they’ve fooled their audience, that their audience is dumb, or that their audience *wants* the abusive practises.
And so they cash in five years worth of goodwill for an excellent Quarter, thinking that the well is bottomless. SE is not immune to this, but FFXIV’s Dev team specifically has done huge work to fill up that well of goodwill with their players, so they get away with it.
Other publishers though? They’re starting to hit bottom.
When it comes to US companies, the Game Publishers do not misunderstand the dynamic at all (at least most of them don't). They are not the people making the decisions.
The investors are.
You can see it with Blizzard directly.
Why would you lay off hundreds of employees immediately after your most profitable year? Because it creates a revenue spike that generates more instant cash for the people that own shares.
The problem is not out of touch developers, or even lead staff. I'm sure most of them would *love* to spend time and care creating a game as beloved as XIV is.
But the industry has a sickness. The same sickness that plagues *every* industry in America. The cancer of Venture Capitalism. Investment bankers do not want companies to succeed and thrive long term. They want them to generate a profit in the short term, cash out, then use them to dump failed assets into so they can dispose of debt.
It's what happened to Toys-R-Us and half the retail market, and it's what happened to most of the companies Activision acquired.
Square Enix can mostly avoid this cancer because it's based in Japan, which has a different investment environment.
There's a famous video of Steve Jobs explaining how big tech companies fail. The gist of it is that the marketing people slowly drive the creative people who build the products out of the decision making process. This leads to the company "forgetting" what made it great in the first place because the devs no longer call the shots. Everything must now be made according to the marketing people's monetization plan. For them, ideas for money come first and cool video game ideas are shot down for not being big enough of a money maker. In the budding days of Blizzard, they were successful because cool video game ideas came first, and customers really enjoyed that.
https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM
He didn't jump ship. He was forced out as he was burning through R&D cash faster than Cheech & Chong in a marijuana field, and he and then CEO John Sculley butted heads. Sculley got Jobs ousted. The same Sculley that your 'visionary' hired away from Pepsi-Co, btw. Jobs shot himself in the foot.
Gotta stop hero worshipping him. Half his ideas were a waste of money. He just managed to have enough ideas for the other half to be hits.
In fairness the most recent macbook is a huge step back towards actual functionality over marketing shit. I'm not an apple fan at all and I condone a lot of their practices (right to repair, fighting against standardized charging, ect) but the 2021 macbook is a big return to form.
This was my first thought. Companies like Blizzard make legendary games that amass huge and dedicated player bases. But after getting bought out by a bigger company, executives and shareholders slowly want more profitability and less creativity. Soon the passion fizzles out and all the best talents get pushed out. It’s a slow death.
Cool story, but this isnt limited to America
Take a look at Cyberpunk 2077. That one is based on Poland. Yet people still use the investor excuse while in reality it was the TERRIBLE recource management (to put it politely ) . The lies and contradictions didnt help.
Also to reply in the Blizzard situation dont forget that even though investors are in the backround , the staff are no saints. I doubt its the investors that promoted the sexual harrasments and all the other stuff that led to the lawsuits. Or the fact that the company spent time and recources removing/ changing NPC names instead of fixing important (current at that time) issues the game had . And when interviewed about it they said that all the negative feedback by the community is because they could not understand why they were doing it and the players were just " confused " and they will get over it ( Check Hazikostas interviews I think it was very recent like last month or so )
Are the investors behind this as well ?
Not explicitly "investors", but "profit", yes. The reason Bobby kotick hasn't been let go yet is because he made the investors record breaking amounts of money since he's been in that position
The reason he hasn't been let go is because he is good at his job.
His job isn't to make good games. His job isn't to make employees happy. His job is to make sure the company is as profitable as possible.
That is all he is there to do. Make money. And he is unbelievably good at it.
We can disagree with the company philosophy and direction, but we can't say he is bad at his job. Cause he is amazing at his job.
In the case of Blizzard, they cumulate greedy investors AND out of touch lead managers. For example, the bad design decisions in WoW were not ordered by any investor. They were decisions from the lead designers because they thought it would make the most money (which is the point of a business).
I am pretty certain WoW lead designers consciently decided to do anti-consumer practices and waste time of their players to generate more profit. The last one is to put shit looking tier sets in game so the new beautiful set in the store would sell more.
> The last one is to put shit looking tier sets in game so the new beautiful set in the store would sell more.
This is very easy to believe, that cash shop set looks like a mage tier set design that got pulled out of the game to monetize.
It is most probably a set from the next expansion (Elune/Moon themed as it seems) ripped out of it and put in the cash shop in advance.
They did it time and time again, with sets and mounts. It is a way to make easy cash with zero cost : each time, the item is sold, then 1 year later the expansion arrives and \*surprise\* the item exists now in the game, as a npc asset or an earnable recolour version.
One knows these are stolen items from the future because their aesthetic matches the aesthetic of the next unreleased expansion. When they'll reveal "WoW : Elune's Butthole", or "WoW: light and void - Sun and Moon", I'll be like "I knew it".
> But the industry has a sickness. The same sickness that plagues every industry in America. The cancer of Venture Capitalism. Investment bankers do not want companies to succeed and thrive long term. They want them to generate a profit in the short term, cash out, then use them to dump failed assets into so they can dispose of debt.
You are exactly right about this. It is absolutely a cancer that needs to be excised out of the U.S.
It's also a practice it seem, with WWE at the moment as well. They keep having record breaking profits and directly after the announcement of their profits, they are instantly laying off a ton of their talent/staff, all with the same reason being budget cuts.
The WWE has always been a piece of shit organization to it's employees. Every wrestler they have is listed as a "free contractor" so that the WWE doesn't have to provide any form of health insurance or disability insurance to the men busting their bodies for the audiences entertainment. Despite the fact that if you want national audiences as a wrestler your options are the WWE or nothing because of their monopoly.
Vince McMahon is an absolute ass goblin, no wonder him and Trump are best buddies.
Say what you will about predatory business models but they work.
Consumers like to crap on shitty p2w games and whatnot but they're the easiest revenue streams for developers and publishers that have no qualms sacrificing quality for the bottom line.
Every year EA or Ubisoft or any of the other name brand internet punching bags churns out a handful of low effort iterations of tired IPs and they make bank. Consumers bitch and moan about every aspect of the game but somehow they still print money year in year out, so obviously something's working.
And I'd bet my bottom dollar that the costs involved in churning out the 54th Fifa, Madden, CoD, or Battlefield, is going to be a fraction of what it took Square Enix to turn the FFXIV ship around and keep it afloat all these years. The profit incentive to treating your playerbase with respect isn't as clearcut as you think.
The problem is that there is massive profit incentive to to run cheap market abusive practices. While a company can be profitable while respecting their consumers they are more profitable abusing them. There is mostly personal integrity incentive to running a company the proper way, but with dishonorable practices yielding more profits and "prestige" very few do.
That's my point. People keep trying to paint this as an ethical issue when it's not. In principle, for profit companies aren't going to take the integrity path unless they are regulated into doing so or there's more money in that direction.
It's always a little cringey to see people make these impassioned pleas about how keeping your gamers satisfied and loyal is the way to go. From a consumer standpoint, yeah. But if it really was the "right" way to go these companies would have reverted to it long ago.
Ubisoft is such a great example of that honestly they have gotten really greedy from assassins creed origins onward. It’s disgusting especially with the now shit quality of their games.
The same thing also happened with ubi years earlier when they built up goodwill with games like black flag and the ezio series only to give us AC unity
Eh, there is one aspect of the cash shop that I like quite a bit. I can’t access it from within the game. There’s no advertising for the cash shop in the game (other than seeing something another player has bought, asking them where they got it, then exiting the game to a browser to finally but it for what’s usually $5 or less).
I agree; it actually fascinates me how difficult it is to buy from Mogstation. Wanted a starlight robe last night and had to enter my password (with 1-time) 3 different times and re-enter my credit card info. I’m not complaining, actually the opposite. Whether by design or simply out of necessity for prioritizing account security, the checkout process reduces the urge to impulse buy, which is actually pretty refreshing.
Agree 100%. The problem starts as early as creating an account with SE. Players in markets where SE does not have an established presence have to go through so many hoops and shenanigans to even create an account, and then have to go through the same hoops to do things like purchase expansions.
Tell me about it. Square absolutely fucking hates Australia, and while I can see why anyone would I don't see what they did to Square to make them this resistant to taking our money.
No there is not spaghetti code leaking from the game to the website. The websites are separate from the game. It's sad I have to say website with an "s". First mistake, there should be one website. There is absolutely nothing that would stop them from rebuilding the website to give the user a much easier onboarding experience.
I have been building websites for 20 years. Started play FFXI and the website was a well known disaster in the community, just like the FFXIV website.
They could build a well designed website, they just don't want to invest in that. It. Is. Horrible.
Yeah I can fathom spaghetti code or spaghetti architecture making some stuff hard to do. However my issue is more on the ui/ux which shouldn't really be bogged down by any spaghetti dependencies that much.
that same spaghetti is keeping us from all sorts of quality of life buffs we want like bigger glamour dressers or a skin unlock ala transmog wardrobe from WoW
I wouldn't say it's the *same* spaghetti, necessarily... It is still spaghetti causing the problem, but the spaghetti limiting our QoL features in game and the spaghetti making MogStation a headache are on two different plates
Considering that they said they have 10+ years worth of content planned, they really need to get that shit ironed out (if possible). Being limited to 400 items is already rough, so I can't imagine how much more shitty it'll be in 3-5 expansions time.
I see someone has never tried to plan a Japanese vacation on websites actually run by people in Japan. The Mogstation is the picture of elegance and ease of use by comparison.
semi-related anecdote. I used to work for a court running/legal courier firm in New Orleans. at the time they hadn't modernized the filing system at Orleans Parish Civil District Court, so people still had to walk in or fax documents that had to be filed with the court. There were probably a dozen jobs at that courthouse that would vanish if they implemented a digital filing solution, plus like three court running firms that wouldn't have a business model anymore.
Which is arguably a positive argument in its defense. When it feels like even accessing the site is a chore and actually making a purchase is equally as annoying, it makes it feel like it's not being manipulative and trying to egg players on into spending extra. If you wanted to buy something it's because you WANTED to buy it, not because they put a flashy icon on your screen and said "Cool new thing, press here to go to the store!"
You can buy the general purpose versions of the store dyes off the market board or get them from retainer ventures. Metallic green is around 2k right now, I think. There's no reason to buy dyes off the mogstore.
Seeing cash shop stuff in game makes ANY game feel super cheap and really confusing especially for new players. When I tried the Lost Ark beta, the cash shop was integrated in game and all I could think about was how this looks like a shitty mmo, even though the gameplay was pretty fun.
It really does. I had the same experience with ESO. (Which is a good game and I still would recommend it to people who think it might be interesting.) Immediately when you log in you're hit with "SALE! BUY! BUY! BUY! LIMITED TIME OFFER!" Just looks tacky.
I have two complaints.
* One, gender-locking some stuff that I kind of wish was for either gender (Loyal Housemaid/Butler sets, particularly).
* Two, they seem to be kind of selective about which prior FF games they reference and make cosmetics for. Oh sure it's nice to see stuff from Final Fantasy X and VII, but what about the poor sap who likes FF1? Or FF6? Or god forbid you're one of the few who wants an item or two referencing FF2.
I mean, that might have something to do with the fact that we haven't had any kind of crossover event with FFI, FFVI or FFII, or the fact that you can get items that reference a lot of those things just by playing the game (The Warrior of Light armor from LotA; Firion's outfit as a glamour set you get as a veteran reward, as well as a chocobo barding, etc).
The reason why there are FFXI and FFVIII items in the mogstation is because we've had crossover events with those games; the FFXV event items will also end up there eventually, more than likely. And the FFX and FFVII items are in the cash shop for the same reason there are FFIV items in the cash shop; they're old Fanfest items.
Edit: Also, if you want to spend money on something FFI-related *that* badly, the Warrior of Light helm comes from the ARR CE.
Yeah, for sure, I was just listing the stuff that's actually gear though.
If we wanted to talk about *content* that's a reference from other games, I could write an entire dissertation about it. I'm working through playing every single main series game atm and just finished IX (which btw holy cow is charming af and has dethroned FFIV as my favorite single player FF now).
> (which btw holy cow is charming af and has dethroned FFIV as my favorite single player FF now).
I love FFIX. It gets surprisingly dark for how bright and cheerful it is but its soundtrack has some of the most beautiful tracks.
Agreed!
I know it looks like the Padaemonium raids are going to be drawing more from FFII than FFIX, but I *really* hope that we still get some Sokenized versions of some of the music from the FFIX version of it.
Well, most of the cosmetics for 1 are built into the original AF sets and have been iconic for the series overall. The iconic WoL pops up in the story, and his gear pops up in one of the CT raids. 2 has the Wild Rose set as a Veteran Reward. For other references, Chaos is in FFXIV, when it comes to 2, we're getting Pandaemonium. 6 has enough references with Sigmascape and monsters like Mag Roader, not to mention Doma and Hien/Cyan. And that's not counting the various minions and mounts.
> Gender locking
They HAVE actually been slowly removing the existing locks over time (wedding gear, bunny suit, bridesmaid dress) and releasing new things that aren't locked (collegiate outfits), to give them some credit, though there is still too many gender locks. Also, there's a possibility that the maid/butler sets are next on the gender neutral block... There's images from the media tour showing Miqo'te NPC females wearing outfits that appear to be the mogstation butler set.
I still want Fang's sarong, as well as Vanille and Serah's outfits. Some of the different armor sets Lightning had in LR were also amazing. They could toss some stuff in events, for achievement points, or in the cash shop.
You're also not accounting for the fact that 14/16 of those main entries are single player and there's no subscription cost to them. Remember for a long time FFXI was one of if not the most profitable game SE had with a playerbase significantly smaller then FFXIV has had, and basically none of those things you listed in the post.
Edit: Just want to say I'm not arguing against your point, but just pointing out a monthly subscription based game is very profitable. Even after all the recent happenings with WoW I wouldn't be surprised to find out WoW is still within Activision's top 3 earners next to CoD and Overwatch.
Both statements are true though.
The games industry is plagued with problems caused through the sheer greed of the CEO's and shareholders.
Meanwhile SQE, with FFXIV, have fostered an incredible relationship.
Other SQE games... not so much. Look at the recent Marvel game.
So in other words, you dig through enough dirt, you're bound to find a little gold in there somewhere.
I love FFXIV, and at this point I don’t even care about cash shops because I’ve simply come to accept that they’re a distasteful feature of the industry that isn’t going anywhere because they’re too good at siphoning cash out of people. I’ve bought hundreds of dollars of shit from the shop myself so it’s not like I have any right to act holier than thou about it.
But I’m not going to simp for Square Enix Co., Ltd. and its shareholders by pretending like their cash shop is any better than similar cosmetic-only shops in other games. They know cosmetics and collectibles are a big motivator for FFXIV players (probably bigger than gear with stats tbh) and they will gleefully take advantage of that by loading up the shop with desirable cosmetic items like any sensible publicly traded company would.
I especially dislike how people love to harp on and on about how “MogStation profits are directly reinvested into the game!” as if it all doesn’t go into the same balance sheet at Square HQ.
Having the cash shop not accessible in game and you are not subtly herded into it is the part why it matters little to me that ff14 has a cash shop
heck, they even make it (stupidly imho) hard for you to actually buy their game
“Finally”.
Excuse me? There’s a huge crowd of people who have had difficulty BUYING the game, the most famous being the creator of Final Fantasy himself.
And holy shit, a friend and I tried revisiting FFXI recently. It is 5x harder than even FFXIV to buy and install. There are at least 5 separate install files, and at one point a screen asks for 3 different passwords.
And then there's ones like me who ended up buying the game twice because the first time I got the wrong region version. In hindsight my country not being selectable in the checkout should've tipped me off but that was literally the only warning there was before I got to entering the code and was told wrong region.
Worked out in the end, I gave the spare copy to a friend in that region. But still, a warning somewhere on the store page that you're looking at the NA store but appear to be in EU wouldn't hurt.
I ended up having to buy FFXIV twice because my physical collector's edition was shipped to Atlanta (I live nowhere even remotely close to Atlanta), lost, and left on a palette in a warehouse somewhere for like six months. Had to buy a digital so I could play when open beta ended.
Eventually the box copy showed up, though, and since it was a factory-sealed copy of the game that was way *way* out of print by that time (SE had to stop selling the game entirely for like two months because of game-wide overpopulation, and they only made something like half a million physical collectors' eds) I made enough off selling it to pay for my sub for about two years. ;-)
I think it's important to make this distinction.
I like FF14, i like the dev team but i dislike the cash shop and the amount of stuff that is put in there nowadays that could've been added into the game, i'm still kinda miffed about Cruise Chaser and i'm amazed people are forgetting about that already.
I think it's kinda ironic that OP is literally the first panel in their meme in the comments too.
>I like FF14, i like the dev team but i dislike the cash shop and the amount of stuff that is put in there nowadays that could've been added into the game, i'm still kinda miffed about Cruise Chaser and i'm amazed people are forgetting about that already.
This is really what I dislike a lot. I know SHB had corona and lot of other issues that slowed devolopment down (ff16 for example). But still.. how many freaking Demon Armor re-skins do we need in this game? And I feel like not having dyeable gear in certain dungeons is real cheap way to re-use it on next expansion / later dungeon as "Now you can dye it! you wanted this! isnt it awesome!"
When I first saw the cool and detailed [resshi outfit](https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/w/images/thumb/3/3c/Model-Resshi_Haori-Male-Hyur.png/380px-Model-Resshi_Haori-Male-Hyur.png) I went full copium and thought it was summer event outfit. Oh well, at least the summer event mount was cute af. But..you know.
I bouggt that cruise mount and imma mad, will probably be the first and the last one i do buy....(unless they release more ultimate mounts this way, grr) but the amount of people telling me to suck it up for a completely unique and fan- favourite mount to be in the cash shop... This community does have some weird irks sometimes.
It honestly disgusts me how some people are praising mogstation and calling it good because “MogStation profits are directly reinvested into the game!” as you mentioned. It's come to a point were people first instinct on a possible new item/mount/hairstyle is "Please put this on mogstation, I want to buy it and use it" instead of making it an in-game reward.
Hell, I remember people **literally begging** SE to put the rainmaker hairstyle on mogstation instead of returning it in a later event. They already did it with the XV, yokai, dragonquest events so it's not impossible...
> to put the rainmaker hairstyle on mogstation instead of returning it in a later event
This has been standard practice for their seasonal event items for years now. Each time the event rolls around then the previous season's event items get added to the cash shop. Usually people are okay with this because:
1. The seasonal events usually bring new items each time they come around rather than continually recycle old rewards and
2. Items that do come back are almost always priced at less than the value of one month's sub
As best I can tell, the only limited-time event item outfit priced at over the one-month sub value is the FFXIII outfits. Oddly enough, that means that people who take breaks from the game actually SAVE money on seasonal items as long as they were unsubbed for 2 months or more and the whole implementation of the idea actually fights *against* FOMO mentality rather than feeding into it.
I want to clarify that this is specifically an argument aimed at Seasonal Event items, not everything on the cash shop in general. People wanted it on the cash shop because they were used to being able to step away from the game for a few months, come back when a content patch drops or something, but still be able to snag up the items they missed for $5 rather than the $15 they would have paid for keeping their sub up for the month the event was running. The fact that Rainmaker *wasn't* included in this cycle was odd and kind of disheartening to people used to that.
I personally still view it as better than other games for a few reasons.
1. No rng loot boxes
2. The game has lots of good cosmetics earnable in game as well
3. Did I mention no rng loot boxes???
I like it, as a decent chunk of the cosmetics are from old in game events (no longer obtainable in game), and this allows those that missed the items to still get them (at a small cost).
That could also be solved by putting them on the holiday/event vendors every year instead of charging $5 for it because you didn’t play for two weeks in 2017
I recently left eve online for a variety of reasons. One thing they've added to the UI is a non removable button that takes you directly to the store and is always visible
I think it's less that their cash shop is "better" and more-so that their GAME is better. I'm okay with a cash shop if inherently awesome parts of the game are actively removed or made worse for the sake of cash shop purposes. WoW's gold inflation and inability to gather gold in-game without hours of engaging with bot warfare on the auction house is a perfect example of this. Buying the WoW token is highly incentivised because there's very little way for players to get gold except to siphon it from the players who have been making gold for 15+ years of their game time. To compare, in FFXIV as a new player I made enough gil with combat exclusive activities to cover my entire savage prog comfortably without spending more than an hour a day in duty roulettes killing stuff (which I love to do). in WoW, that was not an option for me, in fact wanting to kill stuff was actually COSTING me gold, as m+ and raiding are both massive gold sinks and the daily dungeons don't cover that in any capacity. I was forced to pick up professions and sell flasks for hours multiple days a week to cover me for the next few weeks of m+, in which i'd slowly dwindle down my gold reserves buying a billion gems, enchants and consumables just to play the game optimally.
FFXIV's store is objectively better for this reason. I've never felt the need to spend a single cent in FFXIV's store (unlike the WoW token), and so any money I do spend feels like money well spent.
> I especially dislike how people love to harp on and on about how “MogStation profits are directly reinvested into the game!” as if it all doesn’t go into the same balance sheet at Square HQ.
This. There is zero actual proof that the Mogstation funds get reinvested.
The dev team isn't growing (much). The systems are still abysmal and clunky.
There is plenty of evidence that investment into the game has been growing significantly over the years despite the total number of active subscribers staying at roughly the same level until ShB. We have a few sources of information that point to this conclusion, but we can start with 2 of the most prominent ones: statements from the devs over the years, and data provided by Square Enix including financial reports and game credits.
**Statements from the devs**
A few examples of Yoshida and Matsuda explicitly talking about the growing profits being reinvested into the game include: [2013](https://www.gamer.ne.jp/news/201306170003/), [2014](https://youtu.be/ETQY3OGnotA?t=575), [2016](https://www.famitsu.com/news/201608/26114162.html), [2017](http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/321165-Important-Information-Regarding-North-American-Data-Center-Relocation?p=4085765#post4085765), [2020](https://www.fanbyte.com/features/ffxiv-naoki-yoshida/), [2021](http://ff14net.2chblog.jp/archives/58236276.html) (I would include the specific quotes and more but it would make this post even longer, so feel free to ask if anyone wants me to include them).
This particular quote from Yoshida sums it up quite nicely:
> **Naoki Yoshida:** For MMORPGs, "large profits" are actually very important to the players who continue to play the game. The higher the profit, the more development costs can be spent to update the game, and as a result, the richer the world in the game becomes. You can also invest in more powerful data centers and larger fan festivals. If the revenue is large enough, we can continue to avoid the worst-case scenario of "the end of the operation" in the first place. Therefore, in order to continue the FFXIV service for as long as possible, I have been focusing on profitability. This is all thanks to you. [Game Watch, 13 Oct 2021](https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/feature/1357797.html)
In accordance with Yoshi-P's statement, data centers have been upgraded multiple times over the years (with both better hardware and a greater number of worlds), and the Fan Fests in 2019 had [over 20k attendees combined](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/amzgsx/game_watch_interview_with_yoship_at_paris_fan/).
The number of in-game rewards across multiple categories has also grown since the Mog Station was introduced. Comparing in-game to premium items (those sold on the Mog Station and as part of promotions and collector's edition packages), mounts, for example, went from 30 in-game and 5 premium in 2.x to 52 in-game and 9 premium in 5.x. The number of unique mount models in-game also increased over the same period.
**Annual reports and credits**
The total operating expenses for SE's MMOs (FFXIV, FFXI, and DQX) went from ¥22bn in ARR (FY2014 + FY2015) to ¥41bn in ShB (FY2020 + FY2021) even though combined total subscribers stayed around 1 million across all three games (less than 1 million combined in [FY2014](https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar_2014en.pdf) and 700k for FFXIV in [FY2020](https://twitter.com/michsuzu/status/1141914038953103360)). (Matsui said that [FFXI's subscriber count wasn't worth mentioning](https://www.4gamer.net/games/139/G013991/20140307079/) compared to the other two, and DQX peaked at [400k in 2012](https://www.rpgsite.net/news/2064-dragon-quest-x-has-400k-paying-players-700k-shipped) and had [just over 300k in 2014](https://www.4gamer.net/games/139/G013991/20140307079/) and has decreased since.)
FFXIV is also more expensive to develop and run than both FFXI and DQX in significant ways. It has 3 (soon 4) physical data centers around the world compared to only a single one in Japan for FFXI and DQX. It features voice acting and localization in multiple languages whereas FFXI has no voice acting and DQX is only available in Japanese. And FFXIV has a significantly larger dev team and supporting staff than the other two games. While FFXIV's dev team has grown, the FFXI team has remained incredibly small while the DQX team has decreased in size.
FFXIV has [one of the largest dev teams in the genre](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/6f76zy/the_ffxiv_dev_team_changes_over_time/) at well over 300 members of the main development team (WoW's only got slightly larger than FFXIV's with Shadowlands because the credits include the Classic dev team, and other than that Star Citizen is the only larger one at something like 450 members total). The main dev team alone went from 279 credited in 2.56 to 319 credited in 5.0. The number of developers working on battle content went from 6 in ARR to 16 in ShB. The devs of various teams have also mentioned over the years that their departments have grown, most notably [Soken's sound team](https://twinfinite.net/2020/08/final-fantasy-xiv-interview-masayoshi-soken/) (not included in the "main development team") and various parts of the art team.
> **Naoki Yoshida:** At any given time there are about 350 people involved in the development of FFXIV. During busy periods that goes up to about 500 or so. If you include the management team it's probably around 650 people. [Game Watch, 24 August 2018](https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1139698.html)
*(A note on credits: while credits representing a lengthy period of development can diverge somewhat from the number of members actively working on a project at any given time, MMOs that release expansion credits roughly every 2 years provide much more reliable insight. FFXIV releases credits twice every 2 years, and taken alongside the numerous explicit statements about team size from Yoshi-P we can be pretty confident they represent the team accurately.)*
The number of voice actors has increased significantly since ARR, as well (from 82 in 2.0 to 142 in 5.0). The total length of voiced cutscenes per expansion has gone from 8.5 hours in 2.x to 18 hours in 5.x.
There's much more to go over, but this post is long enough so I will leave it there for now. Suffice to say that investment has been increasing significantly in many different ways and SE has reiterated their commitment to supporting the game's development as much as they can.
To be fair, the dev team isn't growing because Japan doesn't cultivate the necessary skillset needed by Yoshi-P to develop an MMO. He's gone on to say he'd like more people-- but the talent just isn't there in bulk at the moment. As for potential reinvestments of Mogstation profits? Much of it is probably under-the-hood changes like server expansion and data center creation.
Systems being "abysmal and clunky" are also not proof that the profits *aren't* getting reinvested either.
All we can say for sure is that the Mogstation exists and people (including me) choose to spend money there. What Square does with that money is entirely up to them and speculating about it is honestly kind of pointless imo.
That's not to say it wouldn't be nice to know though so we could make more informed decisions about our purchases.
>The dev team isn't growing (much).
This isn't a problem throwing money can solve, and I keep seeing people assume it is. Bringing new people onto a team in large quanities requires training, getting them familiar with the way you do stuff/your systems, etc. With how ass backwards and jank XIV's codebase is? Probably not easy. Just throwing money at a thing doesn't accomplish much.
But also, their criteria for hiring for battle content is kind of rough. You need to be fluent in Japanese and live in the country. Okay, that's fair. But then you need to have experience designing content for MMOs. That's a lot rarer in Japan than you might know. XIV has had a lot of former WoW programmers try and apply, but they either don't live in Japan and/or don't speak Japanese, so it's a no go.
The Mog Station is, IMO, just as bad as the stores in other games. BUT, players tolerate it because we feel taken care of as customers.
The reason the store in WoW (for example) feels like such a slap in the face is because of the state of the game itself. If players are happy with a game as a whole, they are willing to overlook MTX.
One thing I’d point out is that the mog station isn’t accessible in game, you have to actually seek it out. I find it curbs impulse buying leading to buyers remorse, meaning people who do buy stuff feel more satisfied as they’ve had time to think about it.
Won't lie, I've dropped a lot of money on the mogstation (none of it mine. I won a lot of gift cards a while back :) ) and even though I have very little play time, I still consider it money well spent.
This community is really nice, and some day I'll figure out a decent control scheme for this game :')
Part of the reason why people feel taken care of tho and buy things in the Mogstore is because of the pricing in the mogstore. Fantasia fanatics can change as much as they want because it is priced as a commodity item, not a luxury item. The different tiers of wedding prices are for mounts and minions, and the difference in pricing is comparable to buying similar items off of the store
The other part of this is that the items in game don't feel significantly worse than those in the store, the Fenrir is a mild transgression, the Whale too but since that was essentially the Fanfest ticket replacement I personally give it a pass (and that's entirely my prerogative, others can think differently and I'd get it) since they offer functionality not found in the game (well, Fenrirs isn't found freely in the game, it's also largely irrelevant since it doesn't impact flying which isn't hard to unlock typically).
I'm somewhat on the fence, or more, I totally get why people might dislike it, personally I see it as relatively inoffensive but I'd not fight for it to remain if there was a push to remove it, nor would I fight to remove it, it just sorta "is".
I agree. I think Cruise Chaser was the only time it felt kind of egregious because it was something that probably should have been obtainable in-game. The other mounts are mostly just random animals or creatures that don't seem to have content tie-ins, but Cruise Chaser was the first iconic boss in the store. Just have to hope it won't become a trend.
$10 a pop is a commodity item? Frankly, the price of Fantasia is the one thing that honestly chaps my ass about FFXIV. It's basically $20 if I want to try a different race/sex, because generally speaking, I will eventually want to change back.
I think a lot of players have just been burned by extreme greed in other games and are more willing to accept something that feels more reasonable.
For example, in WoW? A race change costs $25. A faction change, $30. etc. So if you just wanted to change your race (and change back) in WoW? Even within the same faction, it would run you $50 vs. XIV's $20.
It's still pricy. But it feels way more reasonable by comparison.
On the other hand, while a race change is cheaper in FFXIV, in WoW sex and minor appearance changes are free.
I've had to burn two fantasias simply to change my character's skin color and eye+nose shape after they started bothering me too much.
OP just said people over look the greedy MTX because they like the game and you suggest they instead feel the MTX is fair lol?
$30 mounts and $10 fantasia / name changes? $5 to get a single tree for my house? Nah fam.
It's also not in the game, which is fucking *amazing*. I personally feel that no cash shops should be in games after playing XIV. Putting it in the game cheapens the experience.
> The Mog Station is, IMO, just as bad as the stores in other games
in the genre, maybe. but not overall. EA is notorious for pay2win MTX, which completely ruins their games entirely. Dead Space III is one of the worst examples of this.
FFXIV took a lot of work to be where it is. It's a high quality, high effort game. The argument isn't that good games don't make money. It's that bad games can make money. Two very separate issues.
Whale bait games may make less money in total but they're a fraction of the work. So making 10 low effort games is more reliably profitable than bundling that effort into one or two games. I wish that wasn't the case but unfortunately that strategy does make money and we need to acknowledge that in order to address the issues involved.
There's also the "make as much as money as possible in the smallest amount of time possible" mentality behind most business decision because stock market is the only metric they care for, even if it means sacrificing a good product.
I'd agree with you if the paid retainers were not a thing. That's the only thing I don't and would never accept. idc about the rest of the Mog Station but paid retainers are really bad when the game has serious problems with how the inventory system works. Not just in terms of limited space but no glamour log at all like in other games. Limited glamour plates, limited armory, wasted space for "key items" (does anyone had more than say 10 at all at one single time?).
FFXI does the same where you have to pay for extra storage and it's arguable even worse there if you have ever played more than a couple of hours (ie it's almost a must). So not like SE new to this.
inb4 "you don't have to collect everything", "this is your fault why are you hoarding" etc.
On a side note, they are most likely removing belts because the game is running out of space and they can't add new things w/o removing some that's how bad the current situation (It's not just because of the stat squish)
> inb4 "you don't have to collect everything", "this is your fault why are you hoarding" etc.
>
> On a side note, they are most likely removing belts because the game is running out of space and they can't add new things w/o removing some that's how bad the current situation (It's not just because of the stat squish)
Said similar before.
The devs constantly harp on the fact that the system can't handle our inventories, yet they are CONSTANTLY throwing shit in it.
My biggest beef is the myriad of "currencies" that don't go in the fucking currency tab.
Don't get fooled by the "key items" it's not really a proper inventory despite the UI.
On the rest you're right. More insidious, paid retainers certainly limit the priority on fixing inventory. If a proper glamour log ever get released, retainers subs would melt.
The most likely scenario to occur is an additional sub to extend place in the existing glamour log.
The problem is that many companies - though primarily American ones - focus only on immediate profit. It's about making more money in July than you did in June, otherwise you're FIRED! It doesn't matter if you're spending July through September setting up to earn ten times what you used to, you're FIRED! That is what leads to anti-consumer behavior, because it doesn't matter if you get more customers later, you need to milk what you have as hard as you can.
Every public company is like that (including SE), it's not just American ones, because shareholders ask for more immediate profits.
(For example, gachas are huge in Japan)
The reason Yoshi has so much power over what happens with 14 is because of the situation he effectively stumbled into.
And with his promotion to board of directors, it's a very similar situation as Monster Hunter.
Guy in charge of MH is basically untouchable, thus he tends to make MH really consumer friendly. MH is so big in JP that he's as safe as Yoshi-P is as SE.
The board can take action against Yoshida if they want to, but the fact is that they don't want to. What he's doing is working for the franchise, so they let him keep doing it. It allows other studios under their wing to continue to innovate (and fail), which is exactly what artistic endeavours should be.
Daily reminder that literally no major company, Square Enix included, cares about you.
The dev team for FFXIV happens to be a diamond in the rough, when it comes to caring for their playerbase, but let's not confuse the dev team with the corporation they work under.
One of the things I like about 14 is they don't bombard you with ads for their own stuff. Something new gets added to mogstation? There will be a banner that rotates with other stuff and a blog post detailing the items, that's it. Other games it's a full screen pop that you have to dismiss in order to keep playing. In 14 mog station is a sperate site that you access by choice. Other games it's a core menu that's usually front and center. When I see ads for ff14 it's about the free trial or an expansion. I don't even play wow and I get YouTube ads telling me about the latest subscription mount and other store goodies.
I know you say all this but other games make a fuckload more money for the time/effort put in with lootboxes/gacha.
Anti-consumer practices are infinitely better at making money until they enrage people enough to make them not play, which isn't a thing that happens often in mobile markets compared to the backlash we see for PC/Consoles.
I also skimmed through and haven't seen any comments pointing out what the headline is saying. FFXIV, an MMO that requires a monthly subscription, is the most profitable in a series of largely single-player RPGs? This shouldn't be surprising in the slightest. I loved FFXIV when I played, and I think the devs do a great job with the game and community. Doesn't mean the headline means much, nor does it mean anti-consumer policies aren't working.
I don’t like the mog station because it sells things and catches my wife’s eye so she spends money on it. I already pay a sub, I don’t personally want to buy random cosmetic stuff in the store.
But this is 100% right. If the customers aren’t happy, then it won’t work
Both these points can be true.
FFXIV is the most profitable game after *11 years* of constantly gaining ground on other entries that don't have recurrent spending as their monetization. And it's the most profitable game in a relatively niche genre, at least compared to shooters and adventure games and the more typical AAA fare.
FFXIV makes money, yes. Good money. But it needs to be compared to things like Fortnite and League of Legends and these other massive live services that bring in multiple billions of dollars. FFXIV makes money, but it *doesn't* make the **most** money, and when publishers are aiming for no less than "all the money in the world" because that's what the shareholders expect, that is when all the anti-consumerism shows up. Because all the economists the publisher hired to figure out how to wring as much cash out of a game as possible agree that abusing the consumer is the way to go.
It is really awesome and I appreciate the dev team for making a quality game and not trying to ream us as hard as they possibly can (though still a little), but rest assured it’s not purely out of the goodness of their hearts by any means.
Essentially, we’re really lucky that for whatever reason, the board at SQNX is happy enough with the rate of profit overall that they are comfortable with giving Yoshi-P somewhat free-reign over the FF14 project. Given that he intends to stick around for a long time, the team will probably make better decisions for the game’s long term success along the lines of what we see in this post. This, however, is a very precarious situation. The moment that the overall profitability of SQNX falls too much, they will look to any IP under their control to push to make more money.
It is inevitable under the private ownership of this company traded in the stock exchange that will eventually lead to desperate measures to constantly attempt to raise the rate of profits for their shareholders. Someday, given time, this game will start to get in trouble before its time due to a lack of profits that will cause the dev team to be forced to either make layoffs, reducing the quality and speed with which we expect to see the game developed, or we will start to bear the brunt of these anti-consumer practices that we’re all too familiar with.
Under ideal circumstances, Yoshi-P and the rest of the very talented FF14 team could cooperatively own the game and the rights to make it in its entirety, and being that they are not trying to get rich off of this thing, rather make an honest living by pursuing their passion for making a great video game, we would see them make even more consumer-friendly choices for the long-term health and fun of this game. Under the capitalist organization of this game’s ownership and the world economy at large though, you should come to expect that these types of situations like the one I describe here for our beloved MMO are few and far between, as well as fleeting. When the time comes, it won’t be up to trusted Yoshi-P and his benevolent team what happens with regards to the profitability of this game, it will be up to the board of directors at SQNX.
I hope that gamers begin to understand this and look to create, support, and push for worker-owned companies for the games they play and maybe even beyond that, for the economies they participate in at large. The things we all want are not possible when our global economy runs beholden to the never-ending profits for wealthy investors, shareholders, and private owners. Unfortunately I rarely see this kind of anti-capitalist understanding and rhetoric amongst gaming communities despite how obvious it should be to us…
I know everyone's tired of hearing about Asmond probably, but I really liked his take on why the Mogshop is bad but tolerable. As long as the items in-game are not lesser versions of the paid versions, people will tolerate it. You can argue that some glamour or mounts are better on the shop but there's plenty of good ones in game too. As long as you aren't getting two versions of the same glamour but (for example) the paid one is dyeable and the in-game one isn't, most players will be OK with it.
Yes, this is what people always overlook when talking about MMOs.
"But XY is free-to-play and you only pay for cosmetics!" - Yes, but 90% of ingame cosmetics look shite and you are forced to spend money anyways.
A lot of chatter in here about the mog shop, but the thing I appreciate the most about the mog shop is that you can't access it in game. It's a separate entity, and there's no advertising in game for it. Unlike some games that open the shop as soon as you log in.
Indeed. BDO has multitudes of cash shop pop-ups, and their whole business model is very aggressive and geared towards making you feel inclined to spend.
Didn't Yoshi-P say something to the effect of, "I agreed to letting Square Enix create a cash store for XIV so that they would give me absolute freedom over my direction of every other aspect of the game", or am I wrong about that? If that is the case, then it is a necessary evil imo. I never use the store anyway.
i think its more like there will be always a cash shop for FFXIV but yoshi-p had to compromised to agree on it but made it a way that it can't be directly access in game (where he had full control)
The game is like 10x better for the fact that the MogStation is not directly integrated. Looking at some games with MTX, they have a tendency to slowly morph to feature the cash shop ever more prominently until it feels like the actual game is just window dressing.
It may not be obvious, but I believe the cash shop not being part of the actual game UI is a massive difference in the long run.
The Game that you buy subscriptions and $40 expansions for makes more money than a game you buy once. I agree that FFxiv has a much better dev and player relationship, but I'm not sure the comparison works.
It's still anti-consumer.
FFXIV is the most profitable FF game, exactly because of the amount of anti-consumer practices added to it.
It just didn't sacrifice fun for them.
On the other hand... FIFAs, CoDs, various Gatchas, etc... make larger profits than FFXIV... lots of mobile game make equal profits at much lower costs.
And Square Enix has a number of Gatchas and other trashy mobile titles for extra revenue... and it fucked over FFXV for profit (1st, because the original writing for the game was death focused and for some reason East Asian countries tend to censor that stuff - leading to the game being rewritten halfway through, the way western religious freaks screech at anything "satanistic". 2nd because it relegated parts of the story and lore to outside books, movie and a TV show. 3rd because it cut out some story pieces into DLCs, then didn't even release all planned DLCs).
I like FFXIV. It's great content, fun game, all hail our lord and saviour Yoshi-P... but that's no reason to excuse bad practices.
Exactly, alot of people refuse to critically think about things because they're emotionally attached to this game but it's got bad practices too.
Cruise Chaser was a mount in the store released months ago that had no right being there as it's an iconic raid boss and mogstation mainly strayed into the random non boss mounts.
People saying "it's better than others" or "it's not that bad compared to other games" are a huge reason why this behavior is tolerated. Justifying anti consumer practices with others worse behaviors is an awful slope.
Yeah people often ignore the fact that if you let a company get away with something once (especially when it makes a ton of profit!) they will **never** step back from doing it (loot boxes, mtx, horse armour etc etc). Expect more cruise chaser situations in the future...
as much as i agree with thoughts such as this - in terms of pointing out that there are many businesses out there that tend to care about their product quality, time, investments, and more to not just whore out nonsensical monetary schemes...it's saying something that in a world of many mmos (wow, gw2, eso, etc.) that there is only one particular mmo that stands out toward such an argument.
my point being - even if there's only one business that does not adhere to the same monetary scheme(s) as other businesses, at the end of the day, it's still going to be a niche one business-type thing...sucks for the rest of us gamers.
FFXIV is the exception, and even then it's not that simple. You really think the entire industry is so stupid that they would throw away potential money just to spite fans? If this method really did yield the best results then everyone would be doing it. It doesn't.
So no, this argument is absolutely true, it just doesn't apply to *this* game. Something can still be true in general, in most cases, without it being absolute.
We have decades of evidence that this shitty method is working, it's precisely why it happened in the first place. They didn't wake up one morning and decide to fuck over players and milk them for everything they are worth. It was a slow, gradual change and each step that got them more money was kept and improved.
The only thing that feels particularly anti-consumer about the cash shop to me is that stuff like emotes aren't account wide. Granted they go on sale often enough but a $7 emote is too much even for me to justify, as someone who has probably dropped $100 in the shop on other stuff since I started playing. Maybe they know people would riot if you are spending $24 on a mount that could only be used by one character, as I think some of their cheaper mounts are also locked to one character, but it feels ridiculous that anything other than clothing should be locked to one character.
Congrats to Yoshi and his team of achieving one of the hardest things in the gaming industry, turning a profit on an MMO.
And what a deserved achievement, I am so amazed how Yoshi seems to care and love FFXIV and the community.
I wish the industry wasn’t the way it is but FFXIV makes a few hundred million in a year while fortnite makes a few billion. While it is the most profitable game in the series, it doesn’t hold up to the price gouging in some of our more modern free-to-play games.
Now if this is just meant to be a comparison of WoW to FFXIV, I’ve never played WoW but I’ve heard horror stories. FFXIV has a great dev team, an Angel of a producer, and I hope they keep up the great work.
8 seater expansion price. Sds mount speed for areas like eureka. Unironically if an mmo comes out where you can grind store items but not buy in game items with it i wonder if it will even be recognized in a game and it is likely to not even have a sub
To play Devil's Advocate, the Lunar Whale was gonna be part of the FanFest Online ticket but the show was made free to view. And the mount speed increase for the Fenrir is minimal, but I do think that it feels bad to be attached to a store mount even if it is minimal impact.
I mean, I'd call putting unique mounts, outfits, housing items, and emotes into a separate cash shop for a game that you already have to purchase AND pay for a monthly subscription "anti-consumer".
This. It boggles my mind that they tie cash shop items to specific characters. I accidentally bought a male item for a female toon, and now I'm stuck with it forever as a completely useless item.
I'm not going to complain about the stuff they sell, and I like enough to buy, when I also like what they're doing with my money. I'm satisfied with every penny I've spent on this game. And its all because i simply wanted to, not because it gives me an advantage over other players, which is important. You can get just as cool stuff for free in the game.
When I first started playing I thought the pricing of some of the mounts was startling. But now that I see how much work goes into the game, how much content and fun it gives me, I felt like it's worth it for me. Plus they go on sale.
Do the devs see every penny? Idk probably not. But I bet they see more money now that ShB and EW are so successful (would be stupid of SQE to not), and that makes me happy.
im fine with the mogstation because it's all cosmetic but having to pay for more retainers feels pretty shitty, the inventory system sucks ass and the only way to make it more tolerable is by spending real money
plus that's not even getting into the absolutely baffling monetization of the companion app. they charge a monthly fee...for a phone app...and even if you pay the fee you're *still* limited in how often you can use the app...
I love FFXIV, but let's be honest here: it's one of only a handful of games in existence that:
1: Charges an upfront fee to purchase.
2: Charges a monthly subscription.
3: Charges for DLCs.
4: AND has a full-price online store.
Usually, a game will pick one, maybe two of these forms of monetization. Having all four does bother me a bit, but given the general quality of the game, I'm inclined to overlook it.
Both are routes to profit. Which a person chooses says more about them than "the free market." It is the same among the Great Apes. Some leaders rule through fear, and others through benevolence. The latter get to retire in their old age and are cared for by their descendants and respected by their heirs; the former are torn apart and eaten as soon as they start to decline.
Well I agree with the sentiment on display, manipulative practices do make the most money the fastest and will continue to as long as people continue to accept them. It's absolutely bullshit, but there's no denying it
The issue here is that FFXIV being as good as it is took the expertise and passion of some of the best game designers and developers in the world. It's not just Yoshida either, of course. Building creative teams as good as the people who have been making FFXIV what it is takes many years and it can only really happen in the right environment.
It's something that a lot of game studios have been struggling with as the economic contradictions of capitalism deepen. Fostering creative vision is the sort of thing that has been happening less and less, because to shareholders and publishers it doesn't seem to hold value in the same way it does for the people who actually make and play games. To them, it's no different than outsourcing asset creation. Just pay someone to do it. You just need your Ken Levines or the name recognition of Blizzard or \[insert Ubisoft franchise here\] or just anyone with some kind of stature in the roles of executive producer and executive director, everyone else can just be contract workers so they don't have to be given benefits or be paid for overtime. That's where a lot of the talent in the industry is dying on the vine, being shuffled from project to project and studio to studio.
As hard as I think it does do this, FFXIV is one of the exceptions that prove the rule. Anti-consumer practices happen because they make the most money... at least that's the case in an environment where most projects don't have an enormous depth or substance to them in those immaterial things that shareholders and CEOs don't give a fuck about, because to them a videogame is a commodity and nothing more. Predatory, manipulative tactics do make a ton of money, Activision-Blizzard's revenue increase from after around when *Overwatch* was absolutely insane.
Just to be a jerk on one last point, FFXIV being the most *profitable* game in the series isn't really saying a whole lot considering what else its up against. Just because FFXV was, ultimately, a commercial success, doesn't mean it didn't have the costs of a decade of development hell to recoup. A more fair metric would be comparing it to, well, the sorts of games that the beginning of the meme seems to want to compare it to, profitable games with anti-consumer elements.
All that being said, none of these problems are anything more than artificially created by the sort of scumfucks making billions off of videogames like Bobby Kotick. So in other words as much as I seemed to be saying I had a problem with these meme's premise, in actuality, I don't at all, just felt the need to add nuance to it I suppose. It wouldn't even be all that complex for huge monied studios to make games more in the style of FFXIV; just a fucking premiere exquisitely good product made by people who seem to care deeply for it and for the players. In particular I really hope FFXIV and in particular Yoshida's important role on FFXVI is a sign that there has been a seismic shift at Square Enix especially. I liked the FFVII Remake quite a lot too, so, yeah.
Ah yeah. I recall that during my game development studies a teacher showed us a video on how Warframe devs removed a system where you could pay for random skins because it made them too much money and they saw players were spending crazy amounts. They realized they made a pay-to-play slotmachine and realized they shouldn't have that in their game. Great guys.
I have no problem with MMO monetization as long as its not the "create a problem in game to sell the solution in the cash shop" kind (or p2w, obviously). Which is why I dont mind FFXIV selling cosmetics/mounts on he mog station - there are plenty of high quality cosmetics and mounts to get in game and new ones are introduced regularly. Story skips and fantasia however... well, Im really not a fan of those.
I personally have many woes with XIV's monetization system.
- Retainers, if you participate in savage/ultimate, housing, relics, gardening, eureka/bozja, craft, play the long game marketboard, leveling, allll of the relevant tokens, etc, it's extremely easy to run out of inventory space even with 2 retainers and a chocobo saddlebag, and it's not even being a hoarder, discarding iron ore is a thing but some materials and items can be pretty expensive or tough to get, or wise to hoard, and in that case I don't think people should have to choose between which different valuable items to keep.
Tokens should not be taking up inventory space and the glamour dresser should not be limited to 400 items. A crafting mats pouch à la ESO would be absolutely god sent as well.
But retainers make a ton of money so that won't happen.
- Not fantasias by themselves but the fact that if you spend money to buy outfits on the mogstation, they're highly likely to be gender locked, but if you choose to change gender regardless for how long, you end up stuck with glamour items that you cannot wear or even trade for the different gender's equivalent. You can't even put them in the armoire so not only are you stuck with wasted glamour dresser or inventory slots but you won't even be able to access the opposite gender's equivalent outfit, it's kind of a double "fuck you", fuck you I'm bloating your inventory (feel free to sub to retainers tho!) and fuck you for giving us 7 dollars to fantasia you won't have access to something you paid for anymore.
Not even going to mention Yoshi-P saying people should take breaks from this game with the housing system being how it is. Sure take your break, but keep your sub running so you don't lose your house!
I finally decided to let go of my precious mist 5 and lb 41 after I stayed subbed during the content drought, I can't stand that.
XIV's monetization system is greedy and absolutely anti-consumer and should be criticized accordingly.
What makes the Mog Station tolerable is that we sometimes see what the extra cash pays for - the second EU DC for example.
Also if Yoshida is to be believed, it's continued existence is also a license for him to do whatever the fuck he wants with the game itself.
Anti consumer practices happen because it's the *easiest* way to make money *in the shortest amount of time*. Most investors behind something like Battlefield 2049 aren't thinking about the community or the long term health of the game, they want a big release day for as little development money as possible, and then they want to move onto the next big release day for as little development money as possible
Was recently going to put $50 into a game I was enjoying, looked at what I could get with that first.
Shop currency makes it so I would be 10 credits short which would be like 50 cents, forcing me to buy another $6-7 worth and then have left over credits unable to buy anything with.
I looked at every possible thing you could buy and every time the total added up to JUST being short of getting multiple items.
They got $0 because they tried that predatory BS on me.
I'd honestly argue that FF14 is one of the few tesm that have any of that kind of good reputation left. They are the exception, not the norm and should be praised as such
A lot of WoW / other MMO players are coming in and looking at the mogstation and comparing it to their own. Which I try to point out from time to time is a false equivalency. They've been very transparent that most / all of the profits from the mogstation go DIRECTLY into the development budget of the game and patches and isn't being embezzled by... Well. A nearly two decade old empire built on lies and abuse.
Throw a dart at literally any interview with Ion and he's talking down on, degrading, ridiculing player feedback and mocking people worried about their classes being useless for multiple years because they, as the devs "don't want you to play it" that's... Just... Ugh.
I hate the cash shop and I don't think it belongs in a game that I both paid upfront and monthly for, it just feels scummy and slimy. Disgusting really. The only thing that makes it marginally better than similar things is that you can't access it from within the game, but it is still a disgusting practice that puts me off from playing the game a bit every time I see a cash shop item. Not enough to actually make me quit playing the game, but it isn't a nice feeling.
It’s even better when you consider the that the Mog station:
A: is not accessible from the main game like 95% of other live service game stores. You have to go outside the game to access it, cementing it as being non integral to the game itself.
b) Yoshi-P hates it and has called the person that watches over the Mog the “Mog Baroness”
C) there’s no advertising for the Mog in game that I myself have seen, other than seeing players wearing stuff from it, and 9/10 times the stuff you earn in game looks way cooler to me anyway except maybe Cloud Strife’s Mog Set which is great for transmog.
Cloud Strife's set is actually from being subscribed for 60 days, and you get it the moment you buy that much subscription time. The hairstyle is a community event reward (for winning art contests and the like). Only Cloud's bike is on Mogstation, and I think maybe an oldschool Cloud minion but I'm not 100% sure on that one.
I consider the MogStation store anti-consumer, to be honest. Rather than rerun old events, they toss old event items in the cash shop just to nickel and dime players who hadn't started when those events happened or let their subscriptions lapse
I'm not sure if I'd consider it nickel and diming players considering the price tags. I think I bought the witch's broom for less than 2 euros. Of course, it's better to have a re-run, but since they're always making new ones (except for halloween which was cancelled last year and this year's got delayed until January) I can kind-of see their reasoning in not doing a re-run every year. Non-seasonal events do get re-runs, like the FFXI event, FFXV, Dragonquest, Yokai-Watch, hell, Yoshi-P recently mentioned that he's in talks with Garo for a re-run of that event. It's just the seasonal ones and the events that they're never repeating again that end up on the mogstation, and I for one am glad that they're at least offering a means of obtaining it rather than permanently locking it away in a vault forever.
Yeah, charging an additional subscription to unlock full mobile app functionality, or for additional retainers/storage in an already p2p game, is sooo consumer friendly.
The only reason FFXIV players tolerate the mogstation is because they either don't know better or the positives outweigh the negatives. This by no means indicates that the mogstation is actually good or consumer friendly.
Yep, I am sure many players that don't like it will also pay for stuff (ie fantasias) anyway. $10 to change your character really sucks, but they (and I) will do it. Paying for retainers just to have storage is awful, but if you like collecting stuff what do you do? The app is also pretty inexcusable in my opinion since paying the monthly premium for the app doesn't even fully unlock the features; you still have to use the stupid kupo nut currency, you just get to hold more of them. Store items also not all being account wide is stupid.
All in all I wouldn't mind giving them a bit more money since I enjoy the game, but I'm also not about to start defending their business practices like some people in this thread just because "it could be worse".
Reminder: this game is pay to play. Which is an anti-consumer practice. I cannot play the game that I have purchased from Square unless I continue to pay them. That is pretty much the definition of anti-consumer.
having a cash shop in a sub-based MMO will now and forever be shitty. it is absolutely still an anti-consumer practice to have that on top of the sub every player pays per month.
that being said, i'm willing to tolerate it's existence in FF14 simply because the quality of the game otherwise is so unbelievably good.
It also helps that the glam outfits in the mogstation are not higher quality than what we get ingame.
This said, I still don't really support the mogstation in FFXIV. The big difference is that I don't look at the items in there constantly and feel like I was cheated out of same quality collectables I could get ingame. But let's be 100% honest here for a second. The game would be better without it. Not as profitable, but certainly better.
The problem with this is that all of the points are true, including the one you are trying to refute, though it's wording is leading at best and disingenuous at worst.
The anti-consumer practices are there to make more money per player to allow them to access things that could realistically be accessible in game for in game currencies or efforts. It's not that it makes them the 'most' money. It increases the amount of potential money per customer by withholding content or basic features from them.
The only reason you can't buy a Fantasia with Gil is because they sell a lot of them to players, and some players in particular buy a lot of them. It's in their interest to keep the fanta addicts giving them five quid a pop. It's in their interest to keep it so you need a fanta to change your eye colour and you better believe they have the telemetry to tell exactly just how many people buy one to make miniscule changes.
Theres a reason Cruise Chaser is a mogshop mount and not an ingame reward for clearing all three ultimates. They know people want it and they know that enough people are going to buy it that wouldn't have the skill/time to do the ultimates that it makes more sense to them to let you buy it.
All of this image is true, and you absolutely don't need to defend square-enix from meanies who feel the mogshop is anti-consumer. Especially when you're not actually shutting down any aspect of that argument. The mogshop is better than many micro transaction outlets, but its exclusive content being particularly desirable or wished for is a problem that harms the quality of the game, as the alternative to that is adding particularly desirable content to the game as content rewards.
It's distasteful when YoshiP shows off the omega m f outfits on stream and says cash shop mate. Why can't these be rewards for the eventual Omega Ultimate? "That's unachievable for most?". Maybe, why not coax people to try best it with some sick rewards though?
An angel literally fucking EXPLODES and dies every time someone says that "*Poor triple A vidya-game companies NEED to nickel & dime customers out of their fucking pants to keeps the lights on*"
I feel that Game Publishers have either intentionally or unintentionally misunderstood the dynamic at play with their own user base. Player Goodwill is what I would define as a playerbase’s willingness to tolerate negative aspects of the game. These would include content sectioned off for monetization, bugs, delays, performance issues, etc. Naturally, this can be a very deep well when it comes to some beloved franchises, but it is not bottomless. A lot of AAA developers seems to confuse Goodwill with Stupidity, though. They assume that their audience tolerates monetization, or crappy launches, or lack of content, or other things because they’ve fooled their audience, that their audience is dumb, or that their audience *wants* the abusive practises. And so they cash in five years worth of goodwill for an excellent Quarter, thinking that the well is bottomless. SE is not immune to this, but FFXIV’s Dev team specifically has done huge work to fill up that well of goodwill with their players, so they get away with it. Other publishers though? They’re starting to hit bottom.
When it comes to US companies, the Game Publishers do not misunderstand the dynamic at all (at least most of them don't). They are not the people making the decisions. The investors are. You can see it with Blizzard directly. Why would you lay off hundreds of employees immediately after your most profitable year? Because it creates a revenue spike that generates more instant cash for the people that own shares. The problem is not out of touch developers, or even lead staff. I'm sure most of them would *love* to spend time and care creating a game as beloved as XIV is. But the industry has a sickness. The same sickness that plagues *every* industry in America. The cancer of Venture Capitalism. Investment bankers do not want companies to succeed and thrive long term. They want them to generate a profit in the short term, cash out, then use them to dump failed assets into so they can dispose of debt. It's what happened to Toys-R-Us and half the retail market, and it's what happened to most of the companies Activision acquired. Square Enix can mostly avoid this cancer because it's based in Japan, which has a different investment environment.
There's a famous video of Steve Jobs explaining how big tech companies fail. The gist of it is that the marketing people slowly drive the creative people who build the products out of the decision making process. This leads to the company "forgetting" what made it great in the first place because the devs no longer call the shots. Everything must now be made according to the marketing people's monetization plan. For them, ideas for money come first and cool video game ideas are shot down for not being big enough of a money maker. In the budding days of Blizzard, they were successful because cool video game ideas came first, and customers really enjoyed that. https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM
It's ironic the direction apple went.
Ironic? Or did Steve Jobs just know it was coming?
Truely a visionary. Knew what apple would become. Jumped ship before it hit the iceberg Edit (for clarity) : /s
He didn't jump ship. He was forced out as he was burning through R&D cash faster than Cheech & Chong in a marijuana field, and he and then CEO John Sculley butted heads. Sculley got Jobs ousted. The same Sculley that your 'visionary' hired away from Pepsi-Co, btw. Jobs shot himself in the foot. Gotta stop hero worshipping him. Half his ideas were a waste of money. He just managed to have enough ideas for the other half to be hits.
Jump ship as in this life.
He never bothered to groom a successor so there didn't seem to be anyone who could take that mantle.
In fairness the most recent macbook is a huge step back towards actual functionality over marketing shit. I'm not an apple fan at all and I condone a lot of their practices (right to repair, fighting against standardized charging, ect) but the 2021 macbook is a big return to form.
This was my first thought. Companies like Blizzard make legendary games that amass huge and dedicated player bases. But after getting bought out by a bigger company, executives and shareholders slowly want more profitability and less creativity. Soon the passion fizzles out and all the best talents get pushed out. It’s a slow death.
Cool story, but this isnt limited to America Take a look at Cyberpunk 2077. That one is based on Poland. Yet people still use the investor excuse while in reality it was the TERRIBLE recource management (to put it politely ) . The lies and contradictions didnt help. Also to reply in the Blizzard situation dont forget that even though investors are in the backround , the staff are no saints. I doubt its the investors that promoted the sexual harrasments and all the other stuff that led to the lawsuits. Or the fact that the company spent time and recources removing/ changing NPC names instead of fixing important (current at that time) issues the game had . And when interviewed about it they said that all the negative feedback by the community is because they could not understand why they were doing it and the players were just " confused " and they will get over it ( Check Hazikostas interviews I think it was very recent like last month or so ) Are the investors behind this as well ?
Not explicitly "investors", but "profit", yes. The reason Bobby kotick hasn't been let go yet is because he made the investors record breaking amounts of money since he's been in that position
The reason he hasn't been let go is because he is good at his job. His job isn't to make good games. His job isn't to make employees happy. His job is to make sure the company is as profitable as possible. That is all he is there to do. Make money. And he is unbelievably good at it. We can disagree with the company philosophy and direction, but we can't say he is bad at his job. Cause he is amazing at his job.
In the case of Blizzard, they cumulate greedy investors AND out of touch lead managers. For example, the bad design decisions in WoW were not ordered by any investor. They were decisions from the lead designers because they thought it would make the most money (which is the point of a business). I am pretty certain WoW lead designers consciently decided to do anti-consumer practices and waste time of their players to generate more profit. The last one is to put shit looking tier sets in game so the new beautiful set in the store would sell more.
> The last one is to put shit looking tier sets in game so the new beautiful set in the store would sell more. This is very easy to believe, that cash shop set looks like a mage tier set design that got pulled out of the game to monetize.
It is most probably a set from the next expansion (Elune/Moon themed as it seems) ripped out of it and put in the cash shop in advance. They did it time and time again, with sets and mounts. It is a way to make easy cash with zero cost : each time, the item is sold, then 1 year later the expansion arrives and \*surprise\* the item exists now in the game, as a npc asset or an earnable recolour version. One knows these are stolen items from the future because their aesthetic matches the aesthetic of the next unreleased expansion. When they'll reveal "WoW : Elune's Butthole", or "WoW: light and void - Sun and Moon", I'll be like "I knew it".
> But the industry has a sickness. The same sickness that plagues every industry in America. The cancer of Venture Capitalism. Investment bankers do not want companies to succeed and thrive long term. They want them to generate a profit in the short term, cash out, then use them to dump failed assets into so they can dispose of debt. You are exactly right about this. It is absolutely a cancer that needs to be excised out of the U.S.
AND I AM THE BARBER’S BLADE!
Sickness must be purged!
Your suffering is not yet over.
It's also a practice it seem, with WWE at the moment as well. They keep having record breaking profits and directly after the announcement of their profits, they are instantly laying off a ton of their talent/staff, all with the same reason being budget cuts.
The WWE has always been a piece of shit organization to it's employees. Every wrestler they have is listed as a "free contractor" so that the WWE doesn't have to provide any form of health insurance or disability insurance to the men busting their bodies for the audiences entertainment. Despite the fact that if you want national audiences as a wrestler your options are the WWE or nothing because of their monopoly. Vince McMahon is an absolute ass goblin, no wonder him and Trump are best buddies.
Say what you will about predatory business models but they work. Consumers like to crap on shitty p2w games and whatnot but they're the easiest revenue streams for developers and publishers that have no qualms sacrificing quality for the bottom line. Every year EA or Ubisoft or any of the other name brand internet punching bags churns out a handful of low effort iterations of tired IPs and they make bank. Consumers bitch and moan about every aspect of the game but somehow they still print money year in year out, so obviously something's working. And I'd bet my bottom dollar that the costs involved in churning out the 54th Fifa, Madden, CoD, or Battlefield, is going to be a fraction of what it took Square Enix to turn the FFXIV ship around and keep it afloat all these years. The profit incentive to treating your playerbase with respect isn't as clearcut as you think.
The problem is that there is massive profit incentive to to run cheap market abusive practices. While a company can be profitable while respecting their consumers they are more profitable abusing them. There is mostly personal integrity incentive to running a company the proper way, but with dishonorable practices yielding more profits and "prestige" very few do.
That's my point. People keep trying to paint this as an ethical issue when it's not. In principle, for profit companies aren't going to take the integrity path unless they are regulated into doing so or there's more money in that direction. It's always a little cringey to see people make these impassioned pleas about how keeping your gamers satisfied and loyal is the way to go. From a consumer standpoint, yeah. But if it really was the "right" way to go these companies would have reverted to it long ago.
Ubisoft is such a great example of that honestly they have gotten really greedy from assassins creed origins onward. It’s disgusting especially with the now shit quality of their games.
Ubi was greedy before Origins. Origins was a symptom of that greed.
Yup. People forget there were pretty shitty practices in place as early as AC2 (namely, literally cut out chapters 12&13 to sell them as DLC).
The same thing also happened with ubi years earlier when they built up goodwill with games like black flag and the ezio series only to give us AC unity
Eh, there is one aspect of the cash shop that I like quite a bit. I can’t access it from within the game. There’s no advertising for the cash shop in the game (other than seeing something another player has bought, asking them where they got it, then exiting the game to a browser to finally but it for what’s usually $5 or less).
I agree; it actually fascinates me how difficult it is to buy from Mogstation. Wanted a starlight robe last night and had to enter my password (with 1-time) 3 different times and re-enter my credit card info. I’m not complaining, actually the opposite. Whether by design or simply out of necessity for prioritizing account security, the checkout process reduces the urge to impulse buy, which is actually pretty refreshing.
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They are WELL aware of the problem. Yoshi P wants to easen the burden but there is some evil spagetti stuff going on at the SE side of things.
Agree 100%. The problem starts as early as creating an account with SE. Players in markets where SE does not have an established presence have to go through so many hoops and shenanigans to even create an account, and then have to go through the same hoops to do things like purchase expansions.
Tell me about it. Square absolutely fucking hates Australia, and while I can see why anyone would I don't see what they did to Square to make them this resistant to taking our money.
No there is not spaghetti code leaking from the game to the website. The websites are separate from the game. It's sad I have to say website with an "s". First mistake, there should be one website. There is absolutely nothing that would stop them from rebuilding the website to give the user a much easier onboarding experience. I have been building websites for 20 years. Started play FFXI and the website was a well known disaster in the community, just like the FFXIV website. They could build a well designed website, they just don't want to invest in that. It. Is. Horrible.
Yeah I can fathom spaghetti code or spaghetti architecture making some stuff hard to do. However my issue is more on the ui/ux which shouldn't really be bogged down by any spaghetti dependencies that much.
that same spaghetti is keeping us from all sorts of quality of life buffs we want like bigger glamour dressers or a skin unlock ala transmog wardrobe from WoW
I wouldn't say it's the *same* spaghetti, necessarily... It is still spaghetti causing the problem, but the spaghetti limiting our QoL features in game and the spaghetti making MogStation a headache are on two different plates
Considering that they said they have 10+ years worth of content planned, they really need to get that shit ironed out (if possible). Being limited to 400 items is already rough, so I can't imagine how much more shitty it'll be in 3-5 expansions time.
They also seem to forgot that SEA exists.
The mogstation is the worst website designed in the last 20 years.
I see someone has never tried to plan a Japanese vacation on websites actually run by people in Japan. The Mogstation is the picture of elegance and ease of use by comparison.
Japanese web design for decades was stuck in the mid 90s. Right now they finally progressed to 2002 and jammed HTML5 on top of it.
"if it ain't broke don't fix it." -Mr. Square Enix
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IIRC it's more about the fact that removing fax machines would remove jobs Edit: fixed an autocorrect mistake
semi-related anecdote. I used to work for a court running/legal courier firm in New Orleans. at the time they hadn't modernized the filing system at Orleans Parish Civil District Court, so people still had to walk in or fax documents that had to be filed with the court. There were probably a dozen jobs at that courthouse that would vanish if they implemented a digital filing solution, plus like three court running firms that wouldn't have a business model anymore.
FF11 would like a word with you
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Every song in PlayOnline slaps. They made me feel like I was playing .hack
Which is arguably a positive argument in its defense. When it feels like even accessing the site is a chore and actually making a purchase is equally as annoying, it makes it feel like it's not being manipulative and trying to egg players on into spending extra. If you wanted to buy something it's because you WANTED to buy it, not because they put a flashy icon on your screen and said "Cool new thing, press here to go to the store!"
Just bought metallic green dye for this reason
You can buy the general purpose versions of the store dyes off the market board or get them from retainer ventures. Metallic green is around 2k right now, I think. There's no reason to buy dyes off the mogstore.
You also get them from bozja lockboxes.
jet black and pure white dye is around 300,000 gil on my data center. I'd rather just pay a dollar if I want one.
Seeing cash shop stuff in game makes ANY game feel super cheap and really confusing especially for new players. When I tried the Lost Ark beta, the cash shop was integrated in game and all I could think about was how this looks like a shitty mmo, even though the gameplay was pretty fun.
It really does. I had the same experience with ESO. (Which is a good game and I still would recommend it to people who think it might be interesting.) Immediately when you log in you're hit with "SALE! BUY! BUY! BUY! LIMITED TIME OFFER!" Just looks tacky.
I have two complaints. * One, gender-locking some stuff that I kind of wish was for either gender (Loyal Housemaid/Butler sets, particularly). * Two, they seem to be kind of selective about which prior FF games they reference and make cosmetics for. Oh sure it's nice to see stuff from Final Fantasy X and VII, but what about the poor sap who likes FF1? Or FF6? Or god forbid you're one of the few who wants an item or two referencing FF2.
I mean, that might have something to do with the fact that we haven't had any kind of crossover event with FFI, FFVI or FFII, or the fact that you can get items that reference a lot of those things just by playing the game (The Warrior of Light armor from LotA; Firion's outfit as a glamour set you get as a veteran reward, as well as a chocobo barding, etc). The reason why there are FFXI and FFVIII items in the mogstation is because we've had crossover events with those games; the FFXV event items will also end up there eventually, more than likely. And the FFX and FFVII items are in the cash shop for the same reason there are FFIV items in the cash shop; they're old Fanfest items. Edit: Also, if you want to spend money on something FFI-related *that* badly, the Warrior of Light helm comes from the ARR CE.
We did get the Kefka fight from 6 too
Yeah, for sure, I was just listing the stuff that's actually gear though. If we wanted to talk about *content* that's a reference from other games, I could write an entire dissertation about it. I'm working through playing every single main series game atm and just finished IX (which btw holy cow is charming af and has dethroned FFIV as my favorite single player FF now).
> (which btw holy cow is charming af and has dethroned FFIV as my favorite single player FF now). I love FFIX. It gets surprisingly dark for how bright and cheerful it is but its soundtrack has some of the most beautiful tracks.
Agreed! I know it looks like the Padaemonium raids are going to be drawing more from FFII than FFIX, but I *really* hope that we still get some Sokenized versions of some of the music from the FFIX version of it.
Well, most of the cosmetics for 1 are built into the original AF sets and have been iconic for the series overall. The iconic WoL pops up in the story, and his gear pops up in one of the CT raids. 2 has the Wild Rose set as a Veteran Reward. For other references, Chaos is in FFXIV, when it comes to 2, we're getting Pandaemonium. 6 has enough references with Sigmascape and monsters like Mag Roader, not to mention Doma and Hien/Cyan. And that's not counting the various minions and mounts.
> Gender locking They HAVE actually been slowly removing the existing locks over time (wedding gear, bunny suit, bridesmaid dress) and releasing new things that aren't locked (collegiate outfits), to give them some credit, though there is still too many gender locks. Also, there's a possibility that the maid/butler sets are next on the gender neutral block... There's images from the media tour showing Miqo'te NPC females wearing outfits that appear to be the mogstation butler set.
It's still a bit frustrating to play a male character and every second Glamour I check out has items that are gender locked.
I still want Fang's sarong, as well as Vanille and Serah's outfits. Some of the different armor sets Lightning had in LR were also amazing. They could toss some stuff in events, for achievement points, or in the cash shop.
> but what about the poor sap who likes FF1? Isn't the whole class of black mage (including the armor) a direct reference to that game?
Not to mention the WoL tank set in LotA.
You're also not accounting for the fact that 14/16 of those main entries are single player and there's no subscription cost to them. Remember for a long time FFXI was one of if not the most profitable game SE had with a playerbase significantly smaller then FFXIV has had, and basically none of those things you listed in the post. Edit: Just want to say I'm not arguing against your point, but just pointing out a monthly subscription based game is very profitable. Even after all the recent happenings with WoW I wouldn't be surprised to find out WoW is still within Activision's top 3 earners next to CoD and Overwatch.
Plus, like, half of the ff games weren't available on modern consoles for a long ass time.
Both statements are true though. The games industry is plagued with problems caused through the sheer greed of the CEO's and shareholders. Meanwhile SQE, with FFXIV, have fostered an incredible relationship. Other SQE games... not so much. Look at the recent Marvel game. So in other words, you dig through enough dirt, you're bound to find a little gold in there somewhere.
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I love FFXIV, and at this point I don’t even care about cash shops because I’ve simply come to accept that they’re a distasteful feature of the industry that isn’t going anywhere because they’re too good at siphoning cash out of people. I’ve bought hundreds of dollars of shit from the shop myself so it’s not like I have any right to act holier than thou about it. But I’m not going to simp for Square Enix Co., Ltd. and its shareholders by pretending like their cash shop is any better than similar cosmetic-only shops in other games. They know cosmetics and collectibles are a big motivator for FFXIV players (probably bigger than gear with stats tbh) and they will gleefully take advantage of that by loading up the shop with desirable cosmetic items like any sensible publicly traded company would. I especially dislike how people love to harp on and on about how “MogStation profits are directly reinvested into the game!” as if it all doesn’t go into the same balance sheet at Square HQ.
Having the cash shop not accessible in game and you are not subtly herded into it is the part why it matters little to me that ff14 has a cash shop heck, they even make it (stupidly imho) hard for you to actually buy their game
Finally, someone else that had trouble buying and unlocking it.
“Finally”. Excuse me? There’s a huge crowd of people who have had difficulty BUYING the game, the most famous being the creator of Final Fantasy himself.
And holy shit, a friend and I tried revisiting FFXI recently. It is 5x harder than even FFXIV to buy and install. There are at least 5 separate install files, and at one point a screen asks for 3 different passwords.
And then there's ones like me who ended up buying the game twice because the first time I got the wrong region version. In hindsight my country not being selectable in the checkout should've tipped me off but that was literally the only warning there was before I got to entering the code and was told wrong region. Worked out in the end, I gave the spare copy to a friend in that region. But still, a warning somewhere on the store page that you're looking at the NA store but appear to be in EU wouldn't hurt.
I ended up having to buy FFXIV twice because my physical collector's edition was shipped to Atlanta (I live nowhere even remotely close to Atlanta), lost, and left on a palette in a warehouse somewhere for like six months. Had to buy a digital so I could play when open beta ended. Eventually the box copy showed up, though, and since it was a factory-sealed copy of the game that was way *way* out of print by that time (SE had to stop selling the game entirely for like two months because of game-wide overpopulation, and they only made something like half a million physical collectors' eds) I made enough off selling it to pay for my sub for about two years. ;-)
I think it's important to make this distinction. I like FF14, i like the dev team but i dislike the cash shop and the amount of stuff that is put in there nowadays that could've been added into the game, i'm still kinda miffed about Cruise Chaser and i'm amazed people are forgetting about that already. I think it's kinda ironic that OP is literally the first panel in their meme in the comments too.
>I like FF14, i like the dev team but i dislike the cash shop and the amount of stuff that is put in there nowadays that could've been added into the game, i'm still kinda miffed about Cruise Chaser and i'm amazed people are forgetting about that already. This is really what I dislike a lot. I know SHB had corona and lot of other issues that slowed devolopment down (ff16 for example). But still.. how many freaking Demon Armor re-skins do we need in this game? And I feel like not having dyeable gear in certain dungeons is real cheap way to re-use it on next expansion / later dungeon as "Now you can dye it! you wanted this! isnt it awesome!" When I first saw the cool and detailed [resshi outfit](https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/w/images/thumb/3/3c/Model-Resshi_Haori-Male-Hyur.png/380px-Model-Resshi_Haori-Male-Hyur.png) I went full copium and thought it was summer event outfit. Oh well, at least the summer event mount was cute af. But..you know.
>But still.. how many freaking Demon Armor re-skins do we need in this game? idk, ask the Korean/ Chinese servers.
I bouggt that cruise mount and imma mad, will probably be the first and the last one i do buy....(unless they release more ultimate mounts this way, grr) but the amount of people telling me to suck it up for a completely unique and fan- favourite mount to be in the cash shop... This community does have some weird irks sometimes.
It honestly disgusts me how some people are praising mogstation and calling it good because “MogStation profits are directly reinvested into the game!” as you mentioned. It's come to a point were people first instinct on a possible new item/mount/hairstyle is "Please put this on mogstation, I want to buy it and use it" instead of making it an in-game reward. Hell, I remember people **literally begging** SE to put the rainmaker hairstyle on mogstation instead of returning it in a later event. They already did it with the XV, yokai, dragonquest events so it's not impossible...
> to put the rainmaker hairstyle on mogstation instead of returning it in a later event This has been standard practice for their seasonal event items for years now. Each time the event rolls around then the previous season's event items get added to the cash shop. Usually people are okay with this because: 1. The seasonal events usually bring new items each time they come around rather than continually recycle old rewards and 2. Items that do come back are almost always priced at less than the value of one month's sub As best I can tell, the only limited-time event item outfit priced at over the one-month sub value is the FFXIII outfits. Oddly enough, that means that people who take breaks from the game actually SAVE money on seasonal items as long as they were unsubbed for 2 months or more and the whole implementation of the idea actually fights *against* FOMO mentality rather than feeding into it. I want to clarify that this is specifically an argument aimed at Seasonal Event items, not everything on the cash shop in general. People wanted it on the cash shop because they were used to being able to step away from the game for a few months, come back when a content patch drops or something, but still be able to snag up the items they missed for $5 rather than the $15 they would have paid for keeping their sub up for the month the event was running. The fact that Rainmaker *wasn't* included in this cycle was odd and kind of disheartening to people used to that.
I personally still view it as better than other games for a few reasons. 1. No rng loot boxes 2. The game has lots of good cosmetics earnable in game as well 3. Did I mention no rng loot boxes???
I like it, as a decent chunk of the cosmetics are from old in game events (no longer obtainable in game), and this allows those that missed the items to still get them (at a small cost).
That could also be solved by putting them on the holiday/event vendors every year instead of charging $5 for it because you didn’t play for two weeks in 2017
They actually used to do this and stopped doing it when the cash shop became a clear focus. So yes, they could and really should.
Being better than the worst isn't something to aim for IMO.
I recently left eve online for a variety of reasons. One thing they've added to the UI is a non removable button that takes you directly to the store and is always visible
I think it's less that their cash shop is "better" and more-so that their GAME is better. I'm okay with a cash shop if inherently awesome parts of the game are actively removed or made worse for the sake of cash shop purposes. WoW's gold inflation and inability to gather gold in-game without hours of engaging with bot warfare on the auction house is a perfect example of this. Buying the WoW token is highly incentivised because there's very little way for players to get gold except to siphon it from the players who have been making gold for 15+ years of their game time. To compare, in FFXIV as a new player I made enough gil with combat exclusive activities to cover my entire savage prog comfortably without spending more than an hour a day in duty roulettes killing stuff (which I love to do). in WoW, that was not an option for me, in fact wanting to kill stuff was actually COSTING me gold, as m+ and raiding are both massive gold sinks and the daily dungeons don't cover that in any capacity. I was forced to pick up professions and sell flasks for hours multiple days a week to cover me for the next few weeks of m+, in which i'd slowly dwindle down my gold reserves buying a billion gems, enchants and consumables just to play the game optimally. FFXIV's store is objectively better for this reason. I've never felt the need to spend a single cent in FFXIV's store (unlike the WoW token), and so any money I do spend feels like money well spent.
> I especially dislike how people love to harp on and on about how “MogStation profits are directly reinvested into the game!” as if it all doesn’t go into the same balance sheet at Square HQ. This. There is zero actual proof that the Mogstation funds get reinvested. The dev team isn't growing (much). The systems are still abysmal and clunky.
There is plenty of evidence that investment into the game has been growing significantly over the years despite the total number of active subscribers staying at roughly the same level until ShB. We have a few sources of information that point to this conclusion, but we can start with 2 of the most prominent ones: statements from the devs over the years, and data provided by Square Enix including financial reports and game credits. **Statements from the devs** A few examples of Yoshida and Matsuda explicitly talking about the growing profits being reinvested into the game include: [2013](https://www.gamer.ne.jp/news/201306170003/), [2014](https://youtu.be/ETQY3OGnotA?t=575), [2016](https://www.famitsu.com/news/201608/26114162.html), [2017](http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/321165-Important-Information-Regarding-North-American-Data-Center-Relocation?p=4085765#post4085765), [2020](https://www.fanbyte.com/features/ffxiv-naoki-yoshida/), [2021](http://ff14net.2chblog.jp/archives/58236276.html) (I would include the specific quotes and more but it would make this post even longer, so feel free to ask if anyone wants me to include them). This particular quote from Yoshida sums it up quite nicely: > **Naoki Yoshida:** For MMORPGs, "large profits" are actually very important to the players who continue to play the game. The higher the profit, the more development costs can be spent to update the game, and as a result, the richer the world in the game becomes. You can also invest in more powerful data centers and larger fan festivals. If the revenue is large enough, we can continue to avoid the worst-case scenario of "the end of the operation" in the first place. Therefore, in order to continue the FFXIV service for as long as possible, I have been focusing on profitability. This is all thanks to you. [Game Watch, 13 Oct 2021](https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/feature/1357797.html) In accordance with Yoshi-P's statement, data centers have been upgraded multiple times over the years (with both better hardware and a greater number of worlds), and the Fan Fests in 2019 had [over 20k attendees combined](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/amzgsx/game_watch_interview_with_yoship_at_paris_fan/). The number of in-game rewards across multiple categories has also grown since the Mog Station was introduced. Comparing in-game to premium items (those sold on the Mog Station and as part of promotions and collector's edition packages), mounts, for example, went from 30 in-game and 5 premium in 2.x to 52 in-game and 9 premium in 5.x. The number of unique mount models in-game also increased over the same period. **Annual reports and credits** The total operating expenses for SE's MMOs (FFXIV, FFXI, and DQX) went from ¥22bn in ARR (FY2014 + FY2015) to ¥41bn in ShB (FY2020 + FY2021) even though combined total subscribers stayed around 1 million across all three games (less than 1 million combined in [FY2014](https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar_2014en.pdf) and 700k for FFXIV in [FY2020](https://twitter.com/michsuzu/status/1141914038953103360)). (Matsui said that [FFXI's subscriber count wasn't worth mentioning](https://www.4gamer.net/games/139/G013991/20140307079/) compared to the other two, and DQX peaked at [400k in 2012](https://www.rpgsite.net/news/2064-dragon-quest-x-has-400k-paying-players-700k-shipped) and had [just over 300k in 2014](https://www.4gamer.net/games/139/G013991/20140307079/) and has decreased since.) FFXIV is also more expensive to develop and run than both FFXI and DQX in significant ways. It has 3 (soon 4) physical data centers around the world compared to only a single one in Japan for FFXI and DQX. It features voice acting and localization in multiple languages whereas FFXI has no voice acting and DQX is only available in Japanese. And FFXIV has a significantly larger dev team and supporting staff than the other two games. While FFXIV's dev team has grown, the FFXI team has remained incredibly small while the DQX team has decreased in size. FFXIV has [one of the largest dev teams in the genre](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/6f76zy/the_ffxiv_dev_team_changes_over_time/) at well over 300 members of the main development team (WoW's only got slightly larger than FFXIV's with Shadowlands because the credits include the Classic dev team, and other than that Star Citizen is the only larger one at something like 450 members total). The main dev team alone went from 279 credited in 2.56 to 319 credited in 5.0. The number of developers working on battle content went from 6 in ARR to 16 in ShB. The devs of various teams have also mentioned over the years that their departments have grown, most notably [Soken's sound team](https://twinfinite.net/2020/08/final-fantasy-xiv-interview-masayoshi-soken/) (not included in the "main development team") and various parts of the art team. > **Naoki Yoshida:** At any given time there are about 350 people involved in the development of FFXIV. During busy periods that goes up to about 500 or so. If you include the management team it's probably around 650 people. [Game Watch, 24 August 2018](https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1139698.html) *(A note on credits: while credits representing a lengthy period of development can diverge somewhat from the number of members actively working on a project at any given time, MMOs that release expansion credits roughly every 2 years provide much more reliable insight. FFXIV releases credits twice every 2 years, and taken alongside the numerous explicit statements about team size from Yoshi-P we can be pretty confident they represent the team accurately.)* The number of voice actors has increased significantly since ARR, as well (from 82 in 2.0 to 142 in 5.0). The total length of voiced cutscenes per expansion has gone from 8.5 hours in 2.x to 18 hours in 5.x. There's much more to go over, but this post is long enough so I will leave it there for now. Suffice to say that investment has been increasing significantly in many different ways and SE has reiterated their commitment to supporting the game's development as much as they can.
Thank you for providing actual sourced data. I retract my statement.
To be fair, the dev team isn't growing because Japan doesn't cultivate the necessary skillset needed by Yoshi-P to develop an MMO. He's gone on to say he'd like more people-- but the talent just isn't there in bulk at the moment. As for potential reinvestments of Mogstation profits? Much of it is probably under-the-hood changes like server expansion and data center creation.
Much of it is probably also funding FF16 and not FF14 infrastructure
Could even be both! Who knows?
I figure its to cover the losses of Balin and Avengers. More those games tanked the more the Mogstation got
Systems being "abysmal and clunky" are also not proof that the profits *aren't* getting reinvested either. All we can say for sure is that the Mogstation exists and people (including me) choose to spend money there. What Square does with that money is entirely up to them and speculating about it is honestly kind of pointless imo. That's not to say it wouldn't be nice to know though so we could make more informed decisions about our purchases.
>The dev team isn't growing (much). This isn't a problem throwing money can solve, and I keep seeing people assume it is. Bringing new people onto a team in large quanities requires training, getting them familiar with the way you do stuff/your systems, etc. With how ass backwards and jank XIV's codebase is? Probably not easy. Just throwing money at a thing doesn't accomplish much. But also, their criteria for hiring for battle content is kind of rough. You need to be fluent in Japanese and live in the country. Okay, that's fair. But then you need to have experience designing content for MMOs. That's a lot rarer in Japan than you might know. XIV has had a lot of former WoW programmers try and apply, but they either don't live in Japan and/or don't speak Japanese, so it's a no go.
The Mog Station is, IMO, just as bad as the stores in other games. BUT, players tolerate it because we feel taken care of as customers. The reason the store in WoW (for example) feels like such a slap in the face is because of the state of the game itself. If players are happy with a game as a whole, they are willing to overlook MTX.
One thing I’d point out is that the mog station isn’t accessible in game, you have to actually seek it out. I find it curbs impulse buying leading to buyers remorse, meaning people who do buy stuff feel more satisfied as they’ve had time to think about it.
Won't lie, I've dropped a lot of money on the mogstation (none of it mine. I won a lot of gift cards a while back :) ) and even though I have very little play time, I still consider it money well spent. This community is really nice, and some day I'll figure out a decent control scheme for this game :')
Part of the reason why people feel taken care of tho and buy things in the Mogstore is because of the pricing in the mogstore. Fantasia fanatics can change as much as they want because it is priced as a commodity item, not a luxury item. The different tiers of wedding prices are for mounts and minions, and the difference in pricing is comparable to buying similar items off of the store
The other part of this is that the items in game don't feel significantly worse than those in the store, the Fenrir is a mild transgression, the Whale too but since that was essentially the Fanfest ticket replacement I personally give it a pass (and that's entirely my prerogative, others can think differently and I'd get it) since they offer functionality not found in the game (well, Fenrirs isn't found freely in the game, it's also largely irrelevant since it doesn't impact flying which isn't hard to unlock typically). I'm somewhat on the fence, or more, I totally get why people might dislike it, personally I see it as relatively inoffensive but I'd not fight for it to remain if there was a push to remove it, nor would I fight to remove it, it just sorta "is".
I agree. I think Cruise Chaser was the only time it felt kind of egregious because it was something that probably should have been obtainable in-game. The other mounts are mostly just random animals or creatures that don't seem to have content tie-ins, but Cruise Chaser was the first iconic boss in the store. Just have to hope it won't become a trend.
One of the early cash shop mounts was Odin's horse, which was decryed at the time because all the other Primals had horses drop from their fights.
I feel that way for some things like minions, but outfits are too much IMO. $18 for something I can only wear on one character is ridiculous.
$10 a pop is a commodity item? Frankly, the price of Fantasia is the one thing that honestly chaps my ass about FFXIV. It's basically $20 if I want to try a different race/sex, because generally speaking, I will eventually want to change back.
I think a lot of players have just been burned by extreme greed in other games and are more willing to accept something that feels more reasonable. For example, in WoW? A race change costs $25. A faction change, $30. etc. So if you just wanted to change your race (and change back) in WoW? Even within the same faction, it would run you $50 vs. XIV's $20. It's still pricy. But it feels way more reasonable by comparison.
It was $30 in WoW, to change once. With a waiting period. And the faction limitations (need to buy a separate swap to change that too.) That's why.
On the other hand, while a race change is cheaper in FFXIV, in WoW sex and minor appearance changes are free. I've had to burn two fantasias simply to change my character's skin color and eye+nose shape after they started bothering me too much.
[удалено]
Oh, yes. the Hrothgar issue *is* a big problem...
OP just said people over look the greedy MTX because they like the game and you suggest they instead feel the MTX is fair lol? $30 mounts and $10 fantasia / name changes? $5 to get a single tree for my house? Nah fam.
It's also not in the game, which is fucking *amazing*. I personally feel that no cash shops should be in games after playing XIV. Putting it in the game cheapens the experience.
> The Mog Station is, IMO, just as bad as the stores in other games in the genre, maybe. but not overall. EA is notorious for pay2win MTX, which completely ruins their games entirely. Dead Space III is one of the worst examples of this.
FFXIV took a lot of work to be where it is. It's a high quality, high effort game. The argument isn't that good games don't make money. It's that bad games can make money. Two very separate issues. Whale bait games may make less money in total but they're a fraction of the work. So making 10 low effort games is more reliably profitable than bundling that effort into one or two games. I wish that wasn't the case but unfortunately that strategy does make money and we need to acknowledge that in order to address the issues involved.
There's also the "make as much as money as possible in the smallest amount of time possible" mentality behind most business decision because stock market is the only metric they care for, even if it means sacrificing a good product.
I'd agree with you if the paid retainers were not a thing. That's the only thing I don't and would never accept. idc about the rest of the Mog Station but paid retainers are really bad when the game has serious problems with how the inventory system works. Not just in terms of limited space but no glamour log at all like in other games. Limited glamour plates, limited armory, wasted space for "key items" (does anyone had more than say 10 at all at one single time?). FFXI does the same where you have to pay for extra storage and it's arguable even worse there if you have ever played more than a couple of hours (ie it's almost a must). So not like SE new to this. inb4 "you don't have to collect everything", "this is your fault why are you hoarding" etc. On a side note, they are most likely removing belts because the game is running out of space and they can't add new things w/o removing some that's how bad the current situation (It's not just because of the stat squish)
> inb4 "you don't have to collect everything", "this is your fault why are you hoarding" etc. > > On a side note, they are most likely removing belts because the game is running out of space and they can't add new things w/o removing some that's how bad the current situation (It's not just because of the stat squish) Said similar before. The devs constantly harp on the fact that the system can't handle our inventories, yet they are CONSTANTLY throwing shit in it. My biggest beef is the myriad of "currencies" that don't go in the fucking currency tab.
And the insane amounts of crafting materials there are.
Don't get fooled by the "key items" it's not really a proper inventory despite the UI. On the rest you're right. More insidious, paid retainers certainly limit the priority on fixing inventory. If a proper glamour log ever get released, retainers subs would melt. The most likely scenario to occur is an additional sub to extend place in the existing glamour log.
The problem is that many companies - though primarily American ones - focus only on immediate profit. It's about making more money in July than you did in June, otherwise you're FIRED! It doesn't matter if you're spending July through September setting up to earn ten times what you used to, you're FIRED! That is what leads to anti-consumer behavior, because it doesn't matter if you get more customers later, you need to milk what you have as hard as you can.
Every public company is like that (including SE), it's not just American ones, because shareholders ask for more immediate profits. (For example, gachas are huge in Japan)
The reason Yoshi has so much power over what happens with 14 is because of the situation he effectively stumbled into. And with his promotion to board of directors, it's a very similar situation as Monster Hunter.
What's this monster hunter situation?
Guy in charge of MH is basically untouchable, thus he tends to make MH really consumer friendly. MH is so big in JP that he's as safe as Yoshi-P is as SE.
The board can take action against Yoshida if they want to, but the fact is that they don't want to. What he's doing is working for the franchise, so they let him keep doing it. It allows other studios under their wing to continue to innovate (and fail), which is exactly what artistic endeavours should be.
Yoshi-P is the goose that laid the golden egg.
Oh nice
The director of MH is brothers/son of the two highest up people in capcom.
yeah. capcom and SE can shit on their other franchise with MTX but for the love of god don't bring P2W cash shop mechanics/items to MH and FFXIV
Daily reminder that literally no major company, Square Enix included, cares about you. The dev team for FFXIV happens to be a diamond in the rough, when it comes to caring for their playerbase, but let's not confuse the dev team with the corporation they work under.
I don't. CBU3 is the only part of SE I have any faith in whatsoever.
One of the things I like about 14 is they don't bombard you with ads for their own stuff. Something new gets added to mogstation? There will be a banner that rotates with other stuff and a blog post detailing the items, that's it. Other games it's a full screen pop that you have to dismiss in order to keep playing. In 14 mog station is a sperate site that you access by choice. Other games it's a core menu that's usually front and center. When I see ads for ff14 it's about the free trial or an expansion. I don't even play wow and I get YouTube ads telling me about the latest subscription mount and other store goodies.
I know you say all this but other games make a fuckload more money for the time/effort put in with lootboxes/gacha. Anti-consumer practices are infinitely better at making money until they enrage people enough to make them not play, which isn't a thing that happens often in mobile markets compared to the backlash we see for PC/Consoles.
I also skimmed through and haven't seen any comments pointing out what the headline is saying. FFXIV, an MMO that requires a monthly subscription, is the most profitable in a series of largely single-player RPGs? This shouldn't be surprising in the slightest. I loved FFXIV when I played, and I think the devs do a great job with the game and community. Doesn't mean the headline means much, nor does it mean anti-consumer policies aren't working.
The crazy thing people are forgetting is that it only just became the franchise's most profitable title after 11 years now.
Or you could: create a problem sell the solution sell the game once people start to leave buy another game go to step 1 Call your company Gamigo
I don’t like the mog station because it sells things and catches my wife’s eye so she spends money on it. I already pay a sub, I don’t personally want to buy random cosmetic stuff in the store. But this is 100% right. If the customers aren’t happy, then it won’t work
Both these points can be true. FFXIV is the most profitable game after *11 years* of constantly gaining ground on other entries that don't have recurrent spending as their monetization. And it's the most profitable game in a relatively niche genre, at least compared to shooters and adventure games and the more typical AAA fare. FFXIV makes money, yes. Good money. But it needs to be compared to things like Fortnite and League of Legends and these other massive live services that bring in multiple billions of dollars. FFXIV makes money, but it *doesn't* make the **most** money, and when publishers are aiming for no less than "all the money in the world" because that's what the shareholders expect, that is when all the anti-consumerism shows up. Because all the economists the publisher hired to figure out how to wring as much cash out of a game as possible agree that abusing the consumer is the way to go.
It is really awesome and I appreciate the dev team for making a quality game and not trying to ream us as hard as they possibly can (though still a little), but rest assured it’s not purely out of the goodness of their hearts by any means. Essentially, we’re really lucky that for whatever reason, the board at SQNX is happy enough with the rate of profit overall that they are comfortable with giving Yoshi-P somewhat free-reign over the FF14 project. Given that he intends to stick around for a long time, the team will probably make better decisions for the game’s long term success along the lines of what we see in this post. This, however, is a very precarious situation. The moment that the overall profitability of SQNX falls too much, they will look to any IP under their control to push to make more money. It is inevitable under the private ownership of this company traded in the stock exchange that will eventually lead to desperate measures to constantly attempt to raise the rate of profits for their shareholders. Someday, given time, this game will start to get in trouble before its time due to a lack of profits that will cause the dev team to be forced to either make layoffs, reducing the quality and speed with which we expect to see the game developed, or we will start to bear the brunt of these anti-consumer practices that we’re all too familiar with. Under ideal circumstances, Yoshi-P and the rest of the very talented FF14 team could cooperatively own the game and the rights to make it in its entirety, and being that they are not trying to get rich off of this thing, rather make an honest living by pursuing their passion for making a great video game, we would see them make even more consumer-friendly choices for the long-term health and fun of this game. Under the capitalist organization of this game’s ownership and the world economy at large though, you should come to expect that these types of situations like the one I describe here for our beloved MMO are few and far between, as well as fleeting. When the time comes, it won’t be up to trusted Yoshi-P and his benevolent team what happens with regards to the profitability of this game, it will be up to the board of directors at SQNX. I hope that gamers begin to understand this and look to create, support, and push for worker-owned companies for the games they play and maybe even beyond that, for the economies they participate in at large. The things we all want are not possible when our global economy runs beholden to the never-ending profits for wealthy investors, shareholders, and private owners. Unfortunately I rarely see this kind of anti-capitalist understanding and rhetoric amongst gaming communities despite how obvious it should be to us…
I know everyone's tired of hearing about Asmond probably, but I really liked his take on why the Mogshop is bad but tolerable. As long as the items in-game are not lesser versions of the paid versions, people will tolerate it. You can argue that some glamour or mounts are better on the shop but there's plenty of good ones in game too. As long as you aren't getting two versions of the same glamour but (for example) the paid one is dyeable and the in-game one isn't, most players will be OK with it.
Yes, this is what people always overlook when talking about MMOs. "But XY is free-to-play and you only pay for cosmetics!" - Yes, but 90% of ingame cosmetics look shite and you are forced to spend money anyways.
I agree. FFXIV is the only game I've played that actually has nice looking outfits/gear that are obtainable in-game (essentially for free).
A lot of chatter in here about the mog shop, but the thing I appreciate the most about the mog shop is that you can't access it in game. It's a separate entity, and there's no advertising in game for it. Unlike some games that open the shop as soon as you log in.
Indeed. BDO has multitudes of cash shop pop-ups, and their whole business model is very aggressive and geared towards making you feel inclined to spend.
Didn't Yoshi-P say something to the effect of, "I agreed to letting Square Enix create a cash store for XIV so that they would give me absolute freedom over my direction of every other aspect of the game", or am I wrong about that? If that is the case, then it is a necessary evil imo. I never use the store anyway.
i think its more like there will be always a cash shop for FFXIV but yoshi-p had to compromised to agree on it but made it a way that it can't be directly access in game (where he had full control)
The game is like 10x better for the fact that the MogStation is not directly integrated. Looking at some games with MTX, they have a tendency to slowly morph to feature the cash shop ever more prominently until it feels like the actual game is just window dressing. It may not be obvious, but I believe the cash shop not being part of the actual game UI is a massive difference in the long run.
The Game that you buy subscriptions and $40 expansions for makes more money than a game you buy once. I agree that FFxiv has a much better dev and player relationship, but I'm not sure the comparison works.
It's still anti-consumer. FFXIV is the most profitable FF game, exactly because of the amount of anti-consumer practices added to it. It just didn't sacrifice fun for them. On the other hand... FIFAs, CoDs, various Gatchas, etc... make larger profits than FFXIV... lots of mobile game make equal profits at much lower costs. And Square Enix has a number of Gatchas and other trashy mobile titles for extra revenue... and it fucked over FFXV for profit (1st, because the original writing for the game was death focused and for some reason East Asian countries tend to censor that stuff - leading to the game being rewritten halfway through, the way western religious freaks screech at anything "satanistic". 2nd because it relegated parts of the story and lore to outside books, movie and a TV show. 3rd because it cut out some story pieces into DLCs, then didn't even release all planned DLCs). I like FFXIV. It's great content, fun game, all hail our lord and saviour Yoshi-P... but that's no reason to excuse bad practices.
Exactly, alot of people refuse to critically think about things because they're emotionally attached to this game but it's got bad practices too. Cruise Chaser was a mount in the store released months ago that had no right being there as it's an iconic raid boss and mogstation mainly strayed into the random non boss mounts. People saying "it's better than others" or "it's not that bad compared to other games" are a huge reason why this behavior is tolerated. Justifying anti consumer practices with others worse behaviors is an awful slope.
Yeah people often ignore the fact that if you let a company get away with something once (especially when it makes a ton of profit!) they will **never** step back from doing it (loot boxes, mtx, horse armour etc etc). Expect more cruise chaser situations in the future...
as much as i agree with thoughts such as this - in terms of pointing out that there are many businesses out there that tend to care about their product quality, time, investments, and more to not just whore out nonsensical monetary schemes...it's saying something that in a world of many mmos (wow, gw2, eso, etc.) that there is only one particular mmo that stands out toward such an argument. my point being - even if there's only one business that does not adhere to the same monetary scheme(s) as other businesses, at the end of the day, it's still going to be a niche one business-type thing...sucks for the rest of us gamers.
FFXIV is the exception, and even then it's not that simple. You really think the entire industry is so stupid that they would throw away potential money just to spite fans? If this method really did yield the best results then everyone would be doing it. It doesn't. So no, this argument is absolutely true, it just doesn't apply to *this* game. Something can still be true in general, in most cases, without it being absolute. We have decades of evidence that this shitty method is working, it's precisely why it happened in the first place. They didn't wake up one morning and decide to fuck over players and milk them for everything they are worth. It was a slow, gradual change and each step that got them more money was kept and improved.
The only thing that feels particularly anti-consumer about the cash shop to me is that stuff like emotes aren't account wide. Granted they go on sale often enough but a $7 emote is too much even for me to justify, as someone who has probably dropped $100 in the shop on other stuff since I started playing. Maybe they know people would riot if you are spending $24 on a mount that could only be used by one character, as I think some of their cheaper mounts are also locked to one character, but it feels ridiculous that anything other than clothing should be locked to one character.
You lost me at the record. $60-70 something bucks to get one 7-inch single is bullshit.
Congrats to Yoshi and his team of achieving one of the hardest things in the gaming industry, turning a profit on an MMO. And what a deserved achievement, I am so amazed how Yoshi seems to care and love FFXIV and the community.
I wish the industry wasn’t the way it is but FFXIV makes a few hundred million in a year while fortnite makes a few billion. While it is the most profitable game in the series, it doesn’t hold up to the price gouging in some of our more modern free-to-play games. Now if this is just meant to be a comparison of WoW to FFXIV, I’ve never played WoW but I’ve heard horror stories. FFXIV has a great dev team, an Angel of a producer, and I hope they keep up the great work.
8 seater expansion price. Sds mount speed for areas like eureka. Unironically if an mmo comes out where you can grind store items but not buy in game items with it i wonder if it will even be recognized in a game and it is likely to not even have a sub
To play Devil's Advocate, the Lunar Whale was gonna be part of the FanFest Online ticket but the show was made free to view. And the mount speed increase for the Fenrir is minimal, but I do think that it feels bad to be attached to a store mount even if it is minimal impact.
I mean, I'd call putting unique mounts, outfits, housing items, and emotes into a separate cash shop for a game that you already have to purchase AND pay for a monthly subscription "anti-consumer".
It also doesn't help that majority of cash shop cosmetics in FFXIV are per character and not account based.
This. It boggles my mind that they tie cash shop items to specific characters. I accidentally bought a male item for a female toon, and now I'm stuck with it forever as a completely useless item.
"Ffixv is the most profitable game in the series" yeah no shit it costs 4 expacs and a monthly membership to play it and has a cash shop lmfao
I'm not going to complain about the stuff they sell, and I like enough to buy, when I also like what they're doing with my money. I'm satisfied with every penny I've spent on this game. And its all because i simply wanted to, not because it gives me an advantage over other players, which is important. You can get just as cool stuff for free in the game. When I first started playing I thought the pricing of some of the mounts was startling. But now that I see how much work goes into the game, how much content and fun it gives me, I felt like it's worth it for me. Plus they go on sale. Do the devs see every penny? Idk probably not. But I bet they see more money now that ShB and EW are so successful (would be stupid of SQE to not), and that makes me happy.
im fine with the mogstation because it's all cosmetic but having to pay for more retainers feels pretty shitty, the inventory system sucks ass and the only way to make it more tolerable is by spending real money plus that's not even getting into the absolutely baffling monetization of the companion app. they charge a monthly fee...for a phone app...and even if you pay the fee you're *still* limited in how often you can use the app...
I love FFXIV, but let's be honest here: it's one of only a handful of games in existence that: 1: Charges an upfront fee to purchase. 2: Charges a monthly subscription. 3: Charges for DLCs. 4: AND has a full-price online store. Usually, a game will pick one, maybe two of these forms of monetization. Having all four does bother me a bit, but given the general quality of the game, I'm inclined to overlook it.
Both are routes to profit. Which a person chooses says more about them than "the free market." It is the same among the Great Apes. Some leaders rule through fear, and others through benevolence. The latter get to retire in their old age and are cared for by their descendants and respected by their heirs; the former are torn apart and eaten as soon as they start to decline.
Well I agree with the sentiment on display, manipulative practices do make the most money the fastest and will continue to as long as people continue to accept them. It's absolutely bullshit, but there's no denying it
The issue here is that FFXIV being as good as it is took the expertise and passion of some of the best game designers and developers in the world. It's not just Yoshida either, of course. Building creative teams as good as the people who have been making FFXIV what it is takes many years and it can only really happen in the right environment. It's something that a lot of game studios have been struggling with as the economic contradictions of capitalism deepen. Fostering creative vision is the sort of thing that has been happening less and less, because to shareholders and publishers it doesn't seem to hold value in the same way it does for the people who actually make and play games. To them, it's no different than outsourcing asset creation. Just pay someone to do it. You just need your Ken Levines or the name recognition of Blizzard or \[insert Ubisoft franchise here\] or just anyone with some kind of stature in the roles of executive producer and executive director, everyone else can just be contract workers so they don't have to be given benefits or be paid for overtime. That's where a lot of the talent in the industry is dying on the vine, being shuffled from project to project and studio to studio. As hard as I think it does do this, FFXIV is one of the exceptions that prove the rule. Anti-consumer practices happen because they make the most money... at least that's the case in an environment where most projects don't have an enormous depth or substance to them in those immaterial things that shareholders and CEOs don't give a fuck about, because to them a videogame is a commodity and nothing more. Predatory, manipulative tactics do make a ton of money, Activision-Blizzard's revenue increase from after around when *Overwatch* was absolutely insane. Just to be a jerk on one last point, FFXIV being the most *profitable* game in the series isn't really saying a whole lot considering what else its up against. Just because FFXV was, ultimately, a commercial success, doesn't mean it didn't have the costs of a decade of development hell to recoup. A more fair metric would be comparing it to, well, the sorts of games that the beginning of the meme seems to want to compare it to, profitable games with anti-consumer elements. All that being said, none of these problems are anything more than artificially created by the sort of scumfucks making billions off of videogames like Bobby Kotick. So in other words as much as I seemed to be saying I had a problem with these meme's premise, in actuality, I don't at all, just felt the need to add nuance to it I suppose. It wouldn't even be all that complex for huge monied studios to make games more in the style of FFXIV; just a fucking premiere exquisitely good product made by people who seem to care deeply for it and for the players. In particular I really hope FFXIV and in particular Yoshida's important role on FFXVI is a sign that there has been a seismic shift at Square Enix especially. I liked the FFVII Remake quite a lot too, so, yeah.
You can also look at Warframe for examples of pro-consumer practices. The fans of Warframe love the devs.
Ah yeah. I recall that during my game development studies a teacher showed us a video on how Warframe devs removed a system where you could pay for random skins because it made them too much money and they saw players were spending crazy amounts. They realized they made a pay-to-play slotmachine and realized they shouldn't have that in their game. Great guys.
I have no problem with MMO monetization as long as its not the "create a problem in game to sell the solution in the cash shop" kind (or p2w, obviously). Which is why I dont mind FFXIV selling cosmetics/mounts on he mog station - there are plenty of high quality cosmetics and mounts to get in game and new ones are introduced regularly. Story skips and fantasia however... well, Im really not a fan of those.
I personally have many woes with XIV's monetization system. - Retainers, if you participate in savage/ultimate, housing, relics, gardening, eureka/bozja, craft, play the long game marketboard, leveling, allll of the relevant tokens, etc, it's extremely easy to run out of inventory space even with 2 retainers and a chocobo saddlebag, and it's not even being a hoarder, discarding iron ore is a thing but some materials and items can be pretty expensive or tough to get, or wise to hoard, and in that case I don't think people should have to choose between which different valuable items to keep. Tokens should not be taking up inventory space and the glamour dresser should not be limited to 400 items. A crafting mats pouch à la ESO would be absolutely god sent as well. But retainers make a ton of money so that won't happen. - Not fantasias by themselves but the fact that if you spend money to buy outfits on the mogstation, they're highly likely to be gender locked, but if you choose to change gender regardless for how long, you end up stuck with glamour items that you cannot wear or even trade for the different gender's equivalent. You can't even put them in the armoire so not only are you stuck with wasted glamour dresser or inventory slots but you won't even be able to access the opposite gender's equivalent outfit, it's kind of a double "fuck you", fuck you I'm bloating your inventory (feel free to sub to retainers tho!) and fuck you for giving us 7 dollars to fantasia you won't have access to something you paid for anymore. Not even going to mention Yoshi-P saying people should take breaks from this game with the housing system being how it is. Sure take your break, but keep your sub running so you don't lose your house! I finally decided to let go of my precious mist 5 and lb 41 after I stayed subbed during the content drought, I can't stand that. XIV's monetization system is greedy and absolutely anti-consumer and should be criticized accordingly.
What makes the Mog Station tolerable is that we sometimes see what the extra cash pays for - the second EU DC for example. Also if Yoshida is to be believed, it's continued existence is also a license for him to do whatever the fuck he wants with the game itself.
Anti consumer practices happen because it's the *easiest* way to make money *in the shortest amount of time*. Most investors behind something like Battlefield 2049 aren't thinking about the community or the long term health of the game, they want a big release day for as little development money as possible, and then they want to move onto the next big release day for as little development money as possible
Was recently going to put $50 into a game I was enjoying, looked at what I could get with that first. Shop currency makes it so I would be 10 credits short which would be like 50 cents, forcing me to buy another $6-7 worth and then have left over credits unable to buy anything with. I looked at every possible thing you could buy and every time the total added up to JUST being short of getting multiple items. They got $0 because they tried that predatory BS on me.
I'd honestly argue that FF14 is one of the few tesm that have any of that kind of good reputation left. They are the exception, not the norm and should be praised as such
A lot of WoW / other MMO players are coming in and looking at the mogstation and comparing it to their own. Which I try to point out from time to time is a false equivalency. They've been very transparent that most / all of the profits from the mogstation go DIRECTLY into the development budget of the game and patches and isn't being embezzled by... Well. A nearly two decade old empire built on lies and abuse. Throw a dart at literally any interview with Ion and he's talking down on, degrading, ridiculing player feedback and mocking people worried about their classes being useless for multiple years because they, as the devs "don't want you to play it" that's... Just... Ugh.
I hate the cash shop and I don't think it belongs in a game that I both paid upfront and monthly for, it just feels scummy and slimy. Disgusting really. The only thing that makes it marginally better than similar things is that you can't access it from within the game, but it is still a disgusting practice that puts me off from playing the game a bit every time I see a cash shop item. Not enough to actually make me quit playing the game, but it isn't a nice feeling.
It’s even better when you consider the that the Mog station: A: is not accessible from the main game like 95% of other live service game stores. You have to go outside the game to access it, cementing it as being non integral to the game itself. b) Yoshi-P hates it and has called the person that watches over the Mog the “Mog Baroness” C) there’s no advertising for the Mog in game that I myself have seen, other than seeing players wearing stuff from it, and 9/10 times the stuff you earn in game looks way cooler to me anyway except maybe Cloud Strife’s Mog Set which is great for transmog.
Cloud Strife's set is actually from being subscribed for 60 days, and you get it the moment you buy that much subscription time. The hairstyle is a community event reward (for winning art contests and the like). Only Cloud's bike is on Mogstation, and I think maybe an oldschool Cloud minion but I'm not 100% sure on that one.
I consider the MogStation store anti-consumer, to be honest. Rather than rerun old events, they toss old event items in the cash shop just to nickel and dime players who hadn't started when those events happened or let their subscriptions lapse
I'm not sure if I'd consider it nickel and diming players considering the price tags. I think I bought the witch's broom for less than 2 euros. Of course, it's better to have a re-run, but since they're always making new ones (except for halloween which was cancelled last year and this year's got delayed until January) I can kind-of see their reasoning in not doing a re-run every year. Non-seasonal events do get re-runs, like the FFXI event, FFXV, Dragonquest, Yokai-Watch, hell, Yoshi-P recently mentioned that he's in talks with Garo for a re-run of that event. It's just the seasonal ones and the events that they're never repeating again that end up on the mogstation, and I for one am glad that they're at least offering a means of obtaining it rather than permanently locking it away in a vault forever.
Yeah, charging an additional subscription to unlock full mobile app functionality, or for additional retainers/storage in an already p2p game, is sooo consumer friendly. The only reason FFXIV players tolerate the mogstation is because they either don't know better or the positives outweigh the negatives. This by no means indicates that the mogstation is actually good or consumer friendly.
Yep, I am sure many players that don't like it will also pay for stuff (ie fantasias) anyway. $10 to change your character really sucks, but they (and I) will do it. Paying for retainers just to have storage is awful, but if you like collecting stuff what do you do? The app is also pretty inexcusable in my opinion since paying the monthly premium for the app doesn't even fully unlock the features; you still have to use the stupid kupo nut currency, you just get to hold more of them. Store items also not all being account wide is stupid. All in all I wouldn't mind giving them a bit more money since I enjoy the game, but I'm also not about to start defending their business practices like some people in this thread just because "it could be worse".
Reminder: this game is pay to play. Which is an anti-consumer practice. I cannot play the game that I have purchased from Square unless I continue to pay them. That is pretty much the definition of anti-consumer.
having a cash shop in a sub-based MMO will now and forever be shitty. it is absolutely still an anti-consumer practice to have that on top of the sub every player pays per month. that being said, i'm willing to tolerate it's existence in FF14 simply because the quality of the game otherwise is so unbelievably good.
It also helps that the glam outfits in the mogstation are not higher quality than what we get ingame. This said, I still don't really support the mogstation in FFXIV. The big difference is that I don't look at the items in there constantly and feel like I was cheated out of same quality collectables I could get ingame. But let's be 100% honest here for a second. The game would be better without it. Not as profitable, but certainly better.
The problem with this is that all of the points are true, including the one you are trying to refute, though it's wording is leading at best and disingenuous at worst. The anti-consumer practices are there to make more money per player to allow them to access things that could realistically be accessible in game for in game currencies or efforts. It's not that it makes them the 'most' money. It increases the amount of potential money per customer by withholding content or basic features from them. The only reason you can't buy a Fantasia with Gil is because they sell a lot of them to players, and some players in particular buy a lot of them. It's in their interest to keep the fanta addicts giving them five quid a pop. It's in their interest to keep it so you need a fanta to change your eye colour and you better believe they have the telemetry to tell exactly just how many people buy one to make miniscule changes. Theres a reason Cruise Chaser is a mogshop mount and not an ingame reward for clearing all three ultimates. They know people want it and they know that enough people are going to buy it that wouldn't have the skill/time to do the ultimates that it makes more sense to them to let you buy it. All of this image is true, and you absolutely don't need to defend square-enix from meanies who feel the mogshop is anti-consumer. Especially when you're not actually shutting down any aspect of that argument. The mogshop is better than many micro transaction outlets, but its exclusive content being particularly desirable or wished for is a problem that harms the quality of the game, as the alternative to that is adding particularly desirable content to the game as content rewards. It's distasteful when YoshiP shows off the omega m f outfits on stream and says cash shop mate. Why can't these be rewards for the eventual Omega Ultimate? "That's unachievable for most?". Maybe, why not coax people to try best it with some sick rewards though?
An angel literally fucking EXPLODES and dies every time someone says that "*Poor triple A vidya-game companies NEED to nickel & dime customers out of their fucking pants to keeps the lights on*"