You paid WHAT for that WoW mount???
For those of you who don’t play WoW on a regular basis, this may seem like overkill to the umpteenth degree. Hell, even for former player like myself, it seems kind of bat-’sheet’. But for more than 140,000 World of Warcraft players out there, spending 25 bucks on a virtual (read: non-existent) ‘celestial mount’ is a-okay. When you consider that those sales resulted in an extra $3.5 million in revenue for the house that Warcraft built, you can see where this is going. Sure it’s all harmless now, but remember when these in game items cost half as much? Oh and there’s also that little issue of you’re paying $14-and-change per month on the game to begin with.
While I’m aware that microtransactions have been around in games since before the US acknowledged that Korean MMOs existed, it doesn’t change the fact that this kind of seems like yet another attempt by Blizzard to find out just how much money they can squeeze out of their player base before it screams “FOUL!” I mean, will the next batch of paid items be $50 a piece? $100? Much like ‘Collectors Editions’ and ‘Downloadable Content’, it’s not that paying extra money for content is the problem, it’s how much the player is actually getting for the price that is my issue. Sure, the Celestial Mount may be a usable item in the game, but when you consider there are comparable mounts in the game you’re already paying for, the fact that it looks different equates to having the same car either as a convertible or hard top…except that in this case, neither car actually exists except on Blizzards server farm.
So you are, in essence, paying extra for “the Emperor’s new cloths.”
Info: WoW Store
Source: IGN.com
Well, I would first like to congratulate you on breaking the chains of WoW oppression. Second, yes, this is an exorbanent amount to pay for a few lines of code. There’s the $20 cost of the game, at minimum, a $13 per month (for six months) server fee, the $20 cost each for all three of the expansion packs (yes, I’m counting the new one) and now the $25 for a “special” mount, that essentially is just a skin other in-game mounts. This comes to a total of $183 to waste away 6 months of your life in a virtual world. All of this not including the opportunity costs of not working for 6 months.
All I can say is Wow, WoW is now a leech on not just your life, but your wallet as well.
BREAK THE ADDITION! IT’S A NICE DAY OUTSIDE!!! …I promise…
Sadly…it’s also kinda fun.
But yeah…sunlight. :p
Don’t listen to warriorscp3, look at that shiny mount! It’s so celestial. You wants it.
[...] Although, Zynga are not the only company doing this kind of this, the online MMO game of World of Warcraft recently offered players an exclusive – an exclusive in-game mount for $25! [...]