Hyanmen wrote:
Nashred wrote:
I remember when it is was announced that the game was going to be monthly subscription.. What was the reaction? yea no cash shops, Cash shops are the worst, yea no micro transactions they are horrible for the game.
What does the playerbase's naivety have to do with anything? It was never a question of
whether, but always a question of
when. Now we can see that nothing is gained by the playerbase fooling themselves.
The current iteration is the best case scenario anyone could have ever realistically hoped for. They waited a year to open it, the prices are cheaper than the competition and the selection is one of the most innocent out there in the industry. The current complaining is all part of the playerbase being unable to cope with the reality hitting them in the face. SE is not Mother Theresa but SE is the
best alternative anyone here has got. That
does count for something, even if the players living in their FFXIV box are not seeing it.
Not too often I find myself clicking green arrows on this guy's posts, but this is one of the few, lol.
What he said in this quote is spot-on, to be honest. The problem these days, is that the economy all over the world is slipping down and down and getting worse and worse. People want to be penny-pinchers and refuse to pay a cent more than they have to, but yet the developers need to make money too.
So.... people might complain about a $14.95/mo when their competition is $12.95/mo. But, the problem is, SE knows that $14.95 is probably not going to cut it. They could go for awhile on that, heck they might even be able to maintain being In the Black for that, but there's not enough room to really grow (didn't someone say above they have... FOUR... battle coders and ONE guy doing FATEs?) to bring this game to its true potential.
For it to grow, they need........ MONEY.
But, if they raise the monthly subscription price, people will complain and quit the game. They obviously don't want that. When people complained about Retainers, I always wondered: What if they'd have raised the monthly price to $16.95 and simply gave out the 2 retainers as part as a normal update? How many people would have preferred that? At least with the way they did retainers, it was a choice. You could pay less if you wanted, but had less access to the game. There are other games out there with different monthly subs (a Bronze/Silver/Gold type thing).
So now they're trying a Cash Shop, hoping that there are enough people out there who won't cry over the occasional cool item for $10 or even $20 and don't mind dropping a few $ to help people out.
Also, something that I read earlier in this thread irks me a little: Someone said that WoW did a "bad job" with their cash shop. Yes, okay the Lv90 Boost is kinda a "meh" thing, but otherwise
it is exactly the same thing as SE wants to do. In fact you could argue that Retainers are
worse than the Lv90 Boost, because Retainers stay with you forever, while the Lv90 boost only cuts off some 'boring' leveling time. Either way, everybody seems to forget the
millions Blizzard raised for Charity (Hurricane Sandy, Japanese Tsunami, etc) with a couple of their cash shop items (they gave the entire proceeds to said Charities).
The point here is that SE needs more money to grow, but few people want to spend a dime more than they absolutely have to (because of how the economy is) but yet many people complain when an update falls short of its mark when it comes to expectations. Maybe if they were able to grow, hire more people, then maybe their updates would be more up to their expectations.
I think people need to wake up and remember they are paying for a
service run by a For-Profit company. They're doing this because it is their IRL job. This isn't some charity to give people free entertainment. It costs money to develop and run an MMO and in the end, they need their paychecks too. You can't expect everything to be free. You want an awesome game that you really enjoy playing? You need to support it and stop complaining and calling them "greedy". I'm not saying to throw money at it willy-nilly, but the least you guys could do is give them a break when they try to raise more money to expand the game.