Square Enix Security Token

Got this in the mail yesterday afternoon. I have to admit...SE made setting this thing up super easy. I had all three of my accounts linked and mog satchel'd in about 10 minutes.

A lot of people have griped about SE "selling the mog satchel with the added bonus of a security key". (Ring likes to refer to this mentality as the slippery slope theory.) Square-Enix has been offering up in-game items and features for a long time. Fanfests over the years have often had an in-game bonus item for attending players. Some of the merchandise SE has offered through their online store comes with various pieces of furniture or once/day teleport items. It's not at all uncommon for SE to do something like this.

I think the primary reasons this has caused such an uproar are 1) inventory space is something players have been asking about for a long time, 2) account security is something else players have been asking about for a long time and 3) I don't think most of the fan base want to push a button to log in every time just to have access to another large cache of inventory spots. It's laughable at most. SE is most likely losing money in this endeavor to give their playerbase two things they actually want, yet a not-so-large percentage of the playerbase throws a tantrum about it. Sense of entitlement anyone?

As for Ring's slippery slope theory...I agree with this for the most part. Just observing recent trends with SE though, what started out as trinkets related to fanfest items has definitely ballooned into more. Now a lot of items for sale come with in-game items as a bonus. All of those items up to this point were things that you could just categorize as fun. This is the first time SE has added something players have been demanding onto an item you absolutely had to purchase to activate. They even went as far as to place the Mog Satchel menu option there even if you hadn't purchased the security token.

I'm not going to chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling this issue though. It's SE's property, they can do what they want with it. If fans don't like it, they'll give SE the finger and move on. On top of that, I seriously doubt SE would start charging for things like updates, patches, and bug fixes as some have asserted. Those that sincerely believe the $150 or so per year they pay to SE entitles them to get everything SE offers for free seriously need to reconsider just what they're already getting for that relatively small investment. This particular item with the bonus of the Mog Satchel was a necessary move by SE in order to preserve their bottom line.

Let me just tell you...

I work in IT. The sheer amount of time I spend dealing with idiotic customers surfing around on the net for "free" stuff and ultimately compromising their machine's security alone is enough to keep me occupied for the vast majority of each work day. Do you think developing new content, ironing out bugs, dealing with in-game issues, marketing the product, extending your company's reach into other forms of media and maintaining server hardware on top of that level of support can reasonably keep your MONTHLY fee that low for very long? I'm more surprised we haven't had our monthly subscriptions raised to pay for playerbase idiocy than I am at the revelation SE took the initiative and more or less eliminated a lot of the guess/restoration work. Sure, FFXI isn't the only form of revenue SE has, but out of that list I just rambled off, only one of them don't apply if you just look at FFXI's money streams alone.

Bottom line: Kick ass move SE. Do it again. Add more in-game content to anything you want to sell. I may not always purchase it, but I'll always look at it and in the world of business, that's the least any business could ask for.