Blizzard Sells $2 Million In Virtual Livestock In Four Hours
from the celestial-bubbles dept
From Farmville to Second Life, there's no question that if you're able to create a virtual world in which people pay real money for virtual goods, then you've got a winner on your hands. For years now, virtual sweatshops have existed to farm World of Warcraft for gold and rare items, that can then be sold for real money. For example, a "Spectral Tiger" can fetch over $800 on eBay right now. That said, Blizzard has started to capitalize a bit on this trend, and now sells virtual pets through its online store. The latest is a "Celestial Steed," which, for $25, allows players to "travel in style astride wings of pure elemental stardust." In four hours, Blizzard sold approximately $2 million in virtual livestock -- apparently Blizzard understands how to give their community good reasons to buy (which is fortunate for Blizzard, since WoW's subscriber base is rumored to have plateaued).This sale sparked off a bit of a debate amongst the WoW community, who argue that being able to "buy your way" through the game destroys the game in favor of profit. It will be interesting to see if this sentiment grows enough to warrant a Blizzard response -- like we saw in the case of Dungeons & Dragons Online, who removed some recent changes because of overwhelming negative feedback. That said, even if the complaints remain at a dull roar, a glut of Celestial Steeds roaming the plains of Azeroth would wreak havoc on its street value. After all, even though the world is virtual, many of the same laws of economics that affect the real world also apply. Blizzard likely understands these economic concepts will and will undoubtedly stop selling the Celestial Steed at some point to maintain an artificial scarcity.
That said, the only reason such artificial scarcity works in WoW is because Blizzard has absolute control over the economy. Those that think that Blizzard's success automatically means that people will pay for infinite goods in the real world will find that it is a bad comparison to make. So, if you want to sell imaginary, flying horses, then it's best to build a virtual world over which you have total control, in which those horses have some sort of value -- but that's not trivial.
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Filed Under: virtual goods, world of warcraft
Companies: blizzard
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No Way Will This Destroy The Game...
Blizzard not selling any advantages for real money, unless you count being able to get one mount closer to the Stable Keeper achievement. Even if you do count that, achievements don't give any in-game advantage.
This isn't any different than the sales of the Pandaren Monk, Lil X.T., or Lil' K.T. mini-pets, which have also been quite successful.
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I do think that if they release too many pets, it will upset the minipet collecting community, but they've been doing it for a few years now, slowly, with no real backlash so they're doing okay so far.
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only a scientist
I know that Blizzard is in it for the money, but if they were so inclined they could do some interesting experiments here. If they were to stop making this animal -- permanently -- and not continue to invent luxury species, then the population would be non-increasing over time. As they grew rarer, the price would presumably rise, and owners might go to some trouble to protect their animals from vandals or rivals.
And if they gave these animals the ability to breed, that would really be interesting!
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Re: only a scientist
These animals are non-tradeable and cannot die
please learn about a game before you comment on it.
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They're able to peg the value of the celestial steed at $25 because they have so many artificial restrictions on what you can do with it.
However, it's even more interesting that Blizzard themselves are bound essentially by the social rules (ie.. it's unfair to "buy" your way through the game) of the WoW community -- which is why, I suppose, this mount does not afford any in-game advantages, as Rose described.
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Ah. And I'll bet they can't be killed either. I like computer games -- some of them-- and I can't easily put into words how wrong this is. A "steed" that isn't really an animal, or even a possession, but just a decoration that a player can buy. This is one more reason why I don't play these games, but if I did I'd feel nothing but contempt for someone riding around on one of these things. It depresses me that such a huge part of the gaming community likes this trash.
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oh look what a big sword I've got
If I were a ship-model maker, who made a scale model of a yankee clipper in a bottle, brought it to a convention and saw nothing but crowds of people with identical huge styrofoam battleships they'd all bought from the same store, I'd feel bad.
If I were a writer, and I went to a workshop to discuss O'Henry and (*cough*) maybe a short story I'd written, and all people wanted to do was see who had the biggest sheaf of jokes downloaded from the internet, I'd feel bad.
If I were a golfer, and took the game seriously, and the course were crowded all day every day with people showing off their expensive gear and trying to dress and talk as much like Tiger Woods as possible... If I were a pianist, a vinophile, a film buff, a mountain-climber...
I used to play RPG games, and I put some creative effort into it. I made a couple of interesting characters and they had some memorable adventures. I played them in character, with weaknesses and flaws, and subtle relationships with other characters. They earned what success they had, and when they died they stayed dead (except in Paranoia, but that's a special case). And there was nothing more boring than playing with someone who was just working the rules to be the strongest, richest and best-looking.
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People play WoW and other MMOs not only to collect stuff, but to be better than everyone else. One way of measuring "better" is having more exclusive in-game stuff. If you've seen the holiday events, it rewards players for being in-game during holidays and if you complete a bunch of silly quests, you get exclusive items that will theoretically never be available again. Or for example, finishing in the top X% of PvP ladder tournaments over the course of months gives you access to mounts that only maybe 0.5% of the WoW population has, and probably won't ever be available again.
As long as you restrict the sale to a week or less, you can charge more per item for the guarantee of exclusivity for the buyers.
And to reiterate what others have written, this item grants absolutely no real in-game advantage to your character. It does, however, does enlarge a certain virtual organ upon usage.
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Isn't this what Money is for?
What is scary (but still justified) is we have people buy into these platforms and economies where they attach value to objects that really do little more than fire off a few brain synapses. I can't justify arguing against that, however, as I play some FPS's myself and that would be hypocritical. :)
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Spectral Tiger
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Re: Spectral Tiger
You can purchase a playing card with a code for the Spectral Tiger and sell it to anyone else in the world that you want. Butonce you've redeemed the code for a Spectral Tiger, you cannot sell that Celestial Steed to any other player for in-game gold.
In other words, you can't use real money to purchase an item, and then sell that item in-game for in-game currency. If you could do that, then you could use real world currency to eventually purchase in-game currency, which would allow you to purchase better gear. That would upset the game balance, and it would suck.
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The game had a hat system added to it a little while ago. These hats are gained semi-randomly based on play time, or through the crafting system. They've been doing special events where hats are only available for a certain period, and recently have attathed hats to pre-orders of other games through Valves Steam service.
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=3698&p=
http://www.teamfortress.com/pumpk inpatch/
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http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=3045&p=
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Re: Spectral Tiger
Until you redeem the code, there is no interaction in-game regarding the mount. The rarity of the item is why the price is so high.
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Ok lemme break it down
hope this shined some light on it
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Re: Ok lemme break it down
Let me break it down:
In four hours, Blizzard sold approximately $2 million in virtual goods. This is a win for Blizzard and is a real-life example of giving customers a reason to buy without attempting to create an artificial scarcity. Yay!
That's the point of the article.
Hope that shined some light on it.
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Blizzard?
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Personally, I don't see any reason for Blizzard to ever stop the sales of these mounts or the in-game pets from the pet store. People don't buy them for the rarity (after all, most people that can afford a $15 a month subscription are going to be able to put together $10 or $25 for a cosmetic item they really want), they buy them because they think they're pretty.
This is actually something Blizzard have been doing for quite a while through the trading card game - the Spectral Tiger is the one that sells for the most, but there are other cards in that game which provide loot codes for various novelty items (such as a toy train set, or a flying rocket mount). As with the pet store items that followed them, these are all purely cosmetic items - they don't help you level or get better gear or defeat other players in PvP in any way.
Blizzard are well aware of the line between acceptable items and those which affect the competitive aspects of the game (raiding achievements and PvP combat), and recognise their customers would have great cause for complaint if people could legitimately buy their way to an in-game advantage over other players.
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And it's also interesting that there's a "waitlist" for the pets -- I assume that's to avoid the glut of minipets that Rose was talking about as well..
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One thing to keep in mind is that the Blizzard store for WoW in-game items is itself something of a novelty, and this is the very first purchasable in-game mount. Given the large player base, the ease of acquisition and the effectively infinite supply, there's going to be a very large initial rush of purchases that will then dwindle to a comparative trickle.
As the existence of the store becomes less of a novelty, I expect players will start to become more selective about what they buy and you'll eventually stop seeing such large purchasing swarms when new items are announced.
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The reason why I can confirm this is because I bought the mount as a gift for a friend, and my time in wait was over 2 hours, which was amazing since it took a good 15mins just to get the site to load.
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(Plus, if people are genuinely unhappy with their purchase, I believe they can go through the Billing department to get the mount taken off their account and their money refunded)
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However, I also don't care to be overly harsh in judging how other people want to spend their money. I'll (somewhat grudgingly) drop $20 to go see a 90 minute movie. After I walk out of the cinema, the only thing I have left from that experience is a memory, but the well-designed cinemas around here mean I feel it is worth it.
Ditto for $50 (or more) for a day at an amusement park, or a ticket to a concert, a sporting event, or whatever. All transient, ephemeral things with no lasting value (except memories), but I (and people around the world) regularly choose to pay for them. Heck, I'm sure a lot of people would consider me insane for the fact that I'm willing to pay $15 for the privilege of playing amateur cricket of a weekend (since a large part of the time is spent either watching from the shed or standing around fielding).
When you play WoW, you spend quite a lot of time travelling around on your mount, so liking what you see on the screen is a good thing. The mount from the store also offers a few conveniences in the way it handles parts of the game where you aren't allowed to fly, as well as the fact that it applies to all current and future characters on your account (potentially saving a few hundred in-game gold when levelling a new character). While I personally don't want to buy the mount, I can easily see someone feeling that the (very pretty) appearance and the small conveniences are worth $25 to them.
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Some people get a real kick out a cool looking mount, or a silly non-combat pet that does funny things and makes you laugh a little. Since there is a proven demand for them, Blizzard is making the game more fun for people who value them enough to pay for them.
> Aha.. interesting, well even so, the only reason Blizzard can do this is because they have such absolute control over the game's economics.
Comments like this give me the impression you still don't get it. Yes Blizzard has done a better job than most MMO's at designing the game so it has a thriving economy, but it is not so much control as designing the game to be as much fun as they can. You can get hundreds if not thousands of pets in game without buying them for real dollars. Again these things are more like a fashion accessory. They offer no game play advantage, but can still be fun.
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But they do look neat and if I had $25 extra around i would have bought it.
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First, as Rose and others have mentioned the mount doesn't give you any direct in game benefits (beyond having a interesting mount (though that is up to debate as some people make fun of purchasers of the mount)). It "scales" with your known riding speed, so if you have a 310% mount (currently the fastest speed, but only obtainable through certain "difficult" means (usually achievements but also being the top groups in arena play) then it can go 310%. Most people have 280% though and consequently they get a new 280% mount. The mount also scales on the ground as well (60-100%). If you buy the mount and start a new alt character once they hit level 20 they can buy the first mount training for a 60% speed increase. They can then use the CS instead of buying a different mount. Once they hit level 40 they can buy the 100% ground mount speed training (fastest ground speed currently) and the CS will auto-adjust its speed to be 100%.
Secondly, the code that you get from the store is theoretically transferable (I've seen many people selling codes for 10-15 thousand gold on my server), assuming of course you didn't use it already. Once it's used its useless to anyone else. Basically what happens is a person buys several of the codes, and sells them to people in game for whatever price in gold they agree to. I don't know for sure if it's legal (I don't remember their ToS exactly in this case, but they can probably just say it's like gold selling in which case it would be illegal), but people are (were) doing it. One person on my server supposedly sold 10 of those codes during the first few days of it being available. He/She spent $250 in cash but got back over 100k gold (supposedly is key they might have been scamming people by giving them used codes that were thus useless, but I hadn't heard anyone bashing them in chat)
Finally, Blizzard has made it very, very clear they have no intentions in adding stuff to the store that will somehow make people better in game if they buy it (i.e. armor, weapons). They seem to shy away from "forcing" people to buy armor/weapon upgrades through their store becasue then you create a disparity between people who can pay and people who can't. I would assume Blizzard would lose a large portion of their subscriber base becasue of that happening.
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Same as rocket mount, love rocket mount, etc.
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