I understand that charging a price for the game is kind of a safety net in case people don't spend much in the pearl shop but PA must have the data analytics available to see that the potential revenue loss from making the game free would easily be made up from introducing significantly more players to the game and the cash shop.

I want to see this game do well, I want to see more development and improvements and realize that costs money and needs to be justified by the revenue the game pulls in.

Myself personally I have spent I think near $2000 on this game despite its many flaws. 

All this game needs is the next gen versions (which are in development) and some advertising and marketing to draw in new players and it can be booming. Even the console SubReddit is dying. There's been 4 posts in the past week.

I really believe that the game needs to go F2P to draw in more players and I really believe that if it does it can become a lot more popular than it is. It's a good game. It's a good grinder. The combat is good. It just needs a little bit of a kick to get moving

Even just making the game free for a short period along with an aggressive ad campaign on the PlayStation store could help a lot. I've never seen an ad for this game on PlayStation 

I worry that some people are missing out as well. When I first bought the game the performance was awful so I quit and I never picked it back up until guardian came out. A lot of improvements were made from that time but nobody told me to play the game again, I never saw an ad for it, I just decided to reinstall it on a whim and saw that the game was in a good state. 

There may be people who put the game down like I did who don't know that it's significantly improved from its launch