The Blizzard Pet Store is offering two new virtual pets to World of Warcraft players today, one of which has generated over $2 million in sales in its first four hours.
The "
Celestial Steed" (right) is, according to its description on the Blizzard Store, "freshly born from the Twisting Nether" and allows players to "travel in style astride wings of pure elemental stardust."
More research is of course necessary but as of press time, it is widely believed that the Celestial Steed may be the fanciest horse ever born.
The fancy horse costs $25 and offers no new abilities to players, only riding as fast as a character's riding skill will enable it to go.
According to
wow.com, the download queue as of 1:45 Pacific time was at 80,000. At $25 a pop, this means that this noble steed has generated sales of $2 million since its approximate debut at 9:30 this morning, or around $500,000 an hour.
1UP has reached out to Blizzard for commentary from the horse, and will report back if he is available.
Posts
Guess they're making up for a possible IW exodus.
Congratulations Blizzard, you are very good at making money.
Kudos to Blizzard though, with a little bit of shame on the people who bought it.
Keep fighting the good fight, WoW obsessives.
But what the fuck, gamers? I cannot make any sense of this.
ask for an advance in payment
and cry to myself knowing it would never happen
Why do they have to?
This really.
I mean you could buy a bunch of full, good games for $25.
Oh wait, Bobby Kotick's glowing devil eyes are behind this. Nevermind then, keep the blood money.
What is there to defend?
They offered a good, people bought it.
Good for them.
"Fuck, I hear Coke sold a lot of bottles today. I'd like to hear how the Cocacola people defend this one".
What?
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
yeah i honestly have no beef with anyone on this
i just marvel at how good blizzard is at selling stuff
or rather creating an infrastructure for selling things, as the bone behind all of this is WoW, all of the microtransactions is delicious, delicious gravy
Yeah, Blizzard did nothing wrong. This mount adds almost literally nothing to the game. It's not like Blizzard is holding back some key feature and charging for it.
The story is the tens of thousands of people willing to pay $25, or half the cost of almost any other full PC game, for a new flying mount, when it's pretty much guaranteed those people already have a half-dozen other flying mounts. Crazy.
OH MY GOD PEOPLE ARE SPENDING THEIR MONEY ON TRINKETS
HOW DARE THEY
I liked the piece that correctly surmised that the MW2 map pack was $5 too cheap - Activision would have made TEXA$$$$ instead of TEXA$ if it was a $20 purchase instead of $15
I wish I could butterfly-effect back to the 90's forever.
Switch: US 1651-2551-4335 JP 6310-4664-2624
MH3U Monster Cheat Sheet / MH3U Veggie Elder Ticket Guide
Not as good a game as CANABALT
Some people just wrote off an hour as they fired it up to try and beat their previous high score
But most of your contempt should be saved for the morons that gobbles this stuff up and justify a market for it in the first place. I understand the concept of status symbols, but come on. A $25 dollar virtual horse! That does nothing!
It's... I dunno. People confuse me.
people buying expensive shirts confuse me
but you don't see an outrage over expensive shirts
let people spend money how they will
Come on! The entirety of the entertainment industry! It does nothing!
Except entertain and give people (hopefully) what they paid for.
Seriously, bitching about people paying money for something virtual in a game they're paying money (or paid money) that in itself is virtual is all sorts of meta.
And dumb.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Single digit license plates will sell for over a hundred large quite regularly, for states like California or NY that number goes up a few times. Some are quite literally family heirlooms.
The sales suggest the number was far, far too low.
It doesn't quite do nothing.
Buying it means, outside of the fastest mounts in the game, every character that you have on your account, or will ever make on your account, will always have a mount that scales with your riding skill. You technically never have to worry about buying a mount ever again.
But like was said, 98% of the people who bought this probably already have 50 mounts that they never use because their violet proto-drake is faster than them. But like I said, to say it does nothing isn't entirely accurate. It just saves your a minor amount of in-game gold.
To me this is no different than people who buy collectors editions of games for statues, and art books and music CD's. You don't need any of those things, none of them are required to enjoy the game. Neither is this.
People who bought that are idiots, though.
But Blizz is alright.
There were people guessing it was going to be $50 or $100 in the WoW chat thread; simply because there are rare mounts in the collectible card game that sell for that much or more.
People were honestly surprised it only cost $25
This is a hoot to watch.
about 200-400g a character
And I have no regrets about it. I've paid for MMO's monthly (sometimes more than one MMO at a time) for about 8 years straight now.
Plus I still buy single purchase games throughout those years. The idea of paying a bit for something I know I'm going to get life out of and I have already payed many hundreds of dollars for already doesn't seem that out of the ordinary.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Against both Blizzard, and the players. Stop shitting on people having fun, and on people making money off people having fun.
WoW people scare me. This is the MMOG equivalent of gaudy jewelry except even less people will care because it will be freaking common.