Pretty Pony Mount Sells Millions
When I hear “microtransactions”, League of Legends, most of Perfect World’s games and Farmville come to my mind. Not the industry giant (of revenue) World of Warcraft. Well, last week Blizzard announced that they would be releasing a new mount and another (there were two released prior to this batch of “for-real-money” items) companion. Well, the numbers are in, and they’re rather interesting.
Apparently in the first day of sales, the Celestial Steed mount made just over $2 million US. Am I the only one who’s expectations of this item were not nearly that high?
Like I said earlier, this isn’t the first time Blizzard has sold an item like this. The first batch of digital items that you could buy with hard earned cash were all cosmetic, – gameplay worthless – pets that followed you around and looked pretty. Maybe because this mount is actually an item that’s useful to players it’s got more pull with the player base (after some research though, I found that it only goes as fast as the fastest mount that you already own).
Whatever the case, Blizzard has an interesting opportunity on their hands. Along with their income from the monthly subscription, they’ve now shown that they can make a killing selling virtual goods. It would be interesting to see if they reworked the entire game to microtransaction revenue, but it’s unlikely they’d replace their constant income of the subscriptions, and WoW‘s subscriber count doesn’t seem to be faltering at all.
Via: Terra Nova
Indeed, this is actually completely balanced and doesn’t offer any advantage, while still being useful to the entire playerbase.
But it’s a slippery slope. Now they’re selling mounts, how long is it before they’re selling… lasers!
I’m not really that surprised by this, MMO players are likely very receptive to this type of transaction. It does feel like a slippery slope though and PY may be onto something about micro transactions affecting competitive play.
Didn’t this thing cost like $25? Thats a lot of money for a vanity item. That’s like half of a non-Activision/Blizzard PC game, on top of your monthly sub.
The success of this does not bode well. I think Blizzard has some degree of autonomy, but I can’t help but imagining Bobby Kotick salivating over the thought of more trivial shit in exchange for massive sums of cash before his daily commune with Satan.