Not that anyone cares...World of WAHHHHH-craft
With the recent addition of the Celestial Steed to the Blizzard Online Store, there's been the usual outcry from the whinerbase about how unfair it is. The whines usually center around one of a few points:
- It costs too much! Suck it up and get over it, Chester. It's not a requirement, and it doesn't impact gameplay at all. If you don't want to pay $25 (and I don't), don't buy it. Don't complain that it costs more than you think it should
- Eventually they're going to charge for in-game stuff that does improve gameplay! Shut up and/or QQ moar. Blizzard has said over and over again that they won't do this, and for ~5 years we've had no reason to doubt them. They know the kind of vengeful mob that would besiege them if they ever went this route, and it's just not worth the hassle.
- It's just a big cash grab! OF COURSE it's a big cash grab! Here's the thing I haven't heard in any of the discussion on this: Activision/Blizzard is a publicly traded company. Shareholders want one thing above all others: steadily growing revenue/profit. Shareholders are irrational, often unreasonable creatures. They don't like to admit that eventually growth must slow down, and even stop. Nothing can continue to grow forever. WoW's subscriber base has plateaued at around 10-11 million. That's kind of a staggering number, and even though it's a ludicrous amount of revenue for a computer game, it's not enough on its own. So new revenue streams need to be found and mined. And honestly, the Pet Store is absolutely brilliant as far as revenue streams go. Creating a "new" pet or mount has a fairly small cost, especially for repurposed models (like Lil' XT or the Steed, which are reduced-size or re-skinned models). Even for something totally new (Pandaren Monk), I think $500,000 to create/support is a more than generous estimate. So at $25 each, if they sell 500,000 of them (which is almost certainly the very lowest end of the range), that's $12.5 million in revenue. Even if development and support costs $1 million, that's still well over $10 million in *profit*.
The funny thing is, I don't think Blizzard was expecting the sales to be *this* massive. I think they may have been expecting the $25 price point (up until then, the Pet Store had been pricing everything at $10) to translate into fewer sales, and thus a more "rare" feeling to having the mount. Instead, you can't swing a dead cat around in-game without hitting several of these things.
Of course, that's the last complaint. People who bought the mount whine that they're too common. *guffaw*
Posted via web from Dann's posterous