The blogging community was lit up yesterday when Blizzard announced a new addition to its pet store. I’m sure by now you’re familiar with the $25.00 flying pony. This little gem seems to have set a lot of people off and I can’t say I blame them. Cash shops are not new but they’ve been about micro transactions in the past. A dollar here, a dollar there and eventually you’d spend enough to earn your keep. Blizzard, however, wants to double dip and charge both a subscription and sell you pets, mounts and other fluff items.
Truth be told I honestly don’t have a problem with a $25.00 mount unless it does something that mounts you can get in game don’t do. Is it faster? Does it fly higher? Does it make the ladies throb for you? I honestly don’t know so someone will have to inform me on that detail. This move is not unexpected though as the MMORPG economy matures. Look at it this way. For $15 a month you can get a flying mount in game. I had one of those really expensive ones back when I played WoW. It took me weeks to earn enough gold to buy it but I did. Now someone else has the option to come in and buy one right out for a lot of money. What do we have here?
For better or for worse we have capitalism. Blizzard seems to be making the move towards offering premium based items to players in higher tax brackets. I imagine that most players won’t buy this Aston Martin of mounts but enough will. Given the price Blizzard will probably more than pay for the time of the artists who designed this. My biggest concern about this is something I’ve voiced about EverQuest 2. This money doesn’t seem to go to additional artists, modelers, or animators. It just goes to the company coffers. SOE is putting out fewer and fewer new armor models in EQ2. Anything unique or cool looking goes to the marketplace for cosmetic sets. I’m really concerned about this. One of the biggest draws to EverQuest was that the higher you go the more unique you looked in comparison to most players, even if it was just a different color armor. Will these cash shops basically ensure that you need to spend more money to look unique or cool? Possibly so and I think that is a shame. Beyond that I say let the rich folks buy expensive ponies.
All characters are © 2007 - 2010
The mount is indeed purely cosmetic – it moves only as fast as the fastest mount that character already owns (scaling up as you acquire better ones), so its only purpose is to look different. Technically the mount and the minipets (3 so far) count for collect X mounts/pets achievements, but most (not all) people are prepared to write off the possibility of someone buying their way to those achievements at these prices.
As to EQ2′s store, SOE claimed that they hired a new artist with the revenue from SC purchases, such that the new furniture was in addition to, rather than instead of, stuff we would have been getting. Of course, there’s no transparency, so we have no way of knowing if they did decide to pull back resources later, but the carpenters in my guild actually seem relatively happy with the non-SC stuff they got with the expansion. (My understanding on armor is that they didn’t finish tacking the new appearances onto items in time for the expansion launch, and that this either is or will be fixed.)
One of my guild mates brought up the point that by paying 25$ you save yourself the need to grind out money for new mounts along the way. My retort: I bet that mount doesn’t come with training, so you will still be grinding out the expensive part of the process regardless. I don’t expect Blizzard to drop prices. Even at the cost of 2 months of game time, or half an expansion (a truly scary thought) it doesn’t surprise me that the MMO giant has inflated these costs. What surprises me is the masses that following blindly. Granted 25 dollars may not mean as much to someone else as me. Who am I to tell them how to spend their money. But their willingness to do so is teaching blizzard lessons on how far they can go to milk wallets. Unfortunately after making over a million dollars off a mount, I doubt they have any feelings towards hesitation with this kind of offer.
I might be walking away from this game soon. Too much taken, and too little offered.
I have already walked away from the game. It has gotten old, predictable and quite lame as are much of the “kids” who play it in my opinion. My 2 cents.
$15 there, $25 there, $50-60 there, $15, $15, $25…
Each one alone isn’t so bad, but it adds up quickly. The problem I have with it is not so much the money, but that I don’t actually believe that only people with ‘plenty of it’ will be the ones who’ll buy it. I bet dollars to donuts there’s a lot of, say, college or high school students who’ll end up thinking they have to buy it. Games like these do become pathological at some point and it can be tough to break free. I’m not trying to say they should be banned or anything like that — I love to play them myself — I just think that companies behind the games ought to recognize that there isn’t just a profit component about this and that real lives are effected. I’d say the same thing about any industry. Blizzard’s making a killing anyway, if they’re going to go more and more into the Microtransactions, they should at least keep the prices reasonable, or offer players reasonable ways of obtaining the same items in the cash shops.
WoW is slowly turning into Mafia Wars and games of that sort. And personally, since I don’t play WoW, I could give a rats ass how much Blizzard bilks these fanboi’s out of. My problem with it is that since they are are top dog in the industry, others will take note of their success with this and incorporate it into their games. Soon, all MMO’s will be doing this and we’ll all be forced to make the choice of whether or not to participate. If were to remain in the realm of fluff items, I wouldn’t even give it much thought, but you know damn well that it won’t be long before other items will be offered. I mean, if fanboi’s are willing to pay $25 for a so called “vanity” item, how long do you think it will take some genius to say… “Hmm… I bet they’ll pay $(insert dollar amount here) for this Armor set, or this sword, or…”
And I don’t know about you guys, but I love cool looking armor and or weapons. Would it be too far of a leap to think that not too far in the distant future, games will come out where unless you willing to pay for the skins, you’ll pretty much be relegated to bland looking items because they know they’ll be able to charge you for skins, just skins mind you, and people will happily pay for them.
Depressing.
Pingback: Appearance Items « Aim for the Head