Final Fantasy feesFollow

Yes, you must pay the monthly FFXIV subscription fee no matter what.

However, you can play FFXIV (with the subscription fee, of course) without paying for PS+.

Because servers cost money, maintenance costs money and development costs money. If you play a free game instead one of those is going to take a hit or face severe limitations.

But mostly, the reason why you still have to pay for the game despite having Playstation Plus is because SquareEnix has absolutely nothing to do with Playstation Plus, so paying a third party for playstation extra's while playing their game for "free" instead has zero interest or benefit to them.

The cheapest option to subscribe for is 12.99/month.

If you pay 40 for the game (you can probably find it cheaper), keeping in mind you get the first 30 days for free with no subscription costs, you can sub for the following month bringing the total cost to 52.99 for 2 months of FF14. Most games costing 60 dollars do not have near the amount of content that any MMO has, not to mention that most games on the market nowadays have a wealth of DLC you can sink your money into. 2 months would give you plenty of time to beat the main story in the game, and give you a pretty good assessment on whether or not you would want to continue playing the game for 12.99/month. You can cancel paying the sub at any time, even within the first month if you choose to not continue playing.

Most of what the playerbase is paying sub fees for are things like added content (updated every 3 months, give or take), strengthening server capacity, keeping a staff of developers around to ensure everything in the gameworld runs smoothly, keep the fans happy, etc.

It might not be for everybody, it's really just a question of what you wanna spend your money on.

Just do what we do at the house here: subscribe to an MMO (or two as in my case due to split friends). Then take out a Gamefly membership and don't worry about buying console games again unless you *REALLY* want to keep one. For a small monthly fee we're usually going through 2-3 games a month so it's still money saved in the long run (a glut of Tales games lately makes me happy).

Edited, Feb 15th 2014 10:10am by Viertel