The Daily Grind: Have you ever had microtransactioner's remorse?

$2 mil in 4 hours would disagree with you.

People will pay through the nose for whatever Blizzard puts out, as they learned with the 25 dollar plush toys that activate in-game pets a few months ago.

I don't doubt that they'll jack the price up even higher for future products sooner or later.

Lessee... Started the mount queue around 7pm with an 11 hour wait. Finished it about two hours later, not too bad. Totally worth it, the mount is pretty.

Just goes to show you that if your game is great, people will buy your overpriced cashshop items.

i paid $90 to a cam whore once.. does that count?

i felt dirty..

Hah, make that 3.5million for the queue.

Man, think about that. Lets say that their artists took a whole month to build those objects. But, honestly, no way it took them a month. Most of the assets are reused from other WoW models. For the sake of it, we will just assume that a team of, oh 5 people worked non-stop to create these models for a whole month.

Now, lets pretend for a moment that these 5 people make salaries that you wish you made. We will say $120,000/year. 3D artists find themselves in the 35-70 range these days based on experience, but we will just pretend.

So, Blizzard spends $50,000 in art costs. And we will even pretend the same man hours are needed to get all this online. Another $50,000. And server bandwidth is cheap, but we will pretend it isn't. Another $50k - obviously someone is embezzling from the company, but Blizzard don't care! Why?

Even if you think of extreme stupid costs, Blizzard still made over $3,350,000 in, what, a day?

But, lets be real. Blizzard grosses at least 3 million every day from their subscribers alone. What Blizzard makes from WoW in a week, you could live the rest of your life in comfort on.

Nothing wrong with people making money...
As long as it's (mostly)legal, and someone is willing to buy it, have at it.

Things like this form the backbone of capitalism, and no matter how overpriced or worthless, people will still buy it.

Personally, I think they should look a bit more at the supply and demand aspect though and lower the price so more people would buy it.

what? other people have $25 dollars too? that's unpossible!

^ Exactly

No.. you dont keep it forever. You STILL will have to buy a SUB to enjoy it.

Thats something you dont have to in Free to play games. There you buy items that you then OWN in the sence you can use them whenever you like. This is NOT the case in WOW. You will have to PAY them more to get access to your asset that you already bought.

That's a false economy...

You don't get the riding skill for free, which is by far the biggest expense. The mounts themselves cost nothing at all. You're not getting the epic riding skill for free, nor are you getting the cold weather riding skill for free.

Riding skills are 10-25 times more expensive than a mount. A normal flying mount costs 50g, which is a pittance even at level 60. An epic mount costs 200g, which is even less for a level 70, relatively. However, the flying skill is 250g at 60, 5000g at 70 (4000 with northrend rep exalted discount), and 1000g for cold weather flying. So for Northrend flying you're paying at least 1243g20s, at exalted (cold weather flying cannot be discounted), compared to 61g for the level 20, 40 and 60 mounts, total. Even if you include an epic mount, that last figure comes to 261g.

In other words, people are paying $25 for something you can get ingame for just 261g. Given the fact that the celestial steed is more common than ERP'ers in Goldshire by now, that's not really a lot of value for your money is it?

Not to mention the ridiculous lorelol that the mount represents. Seriously, why would there be a horse that looks like Algalon? What possible use would the titans have had for such a thing? Invincible was already a big stretch. This RMT mount is plain stupid, if you ask me.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but I thought the 5k price applied to the training for epic flying not the actual mount. Therefore if you started a new alt you would still have to pay out 5k for the training before flying the new mount at "epic" speed - having this mount doesnt magically grant every alt you have with epic flying, or am I wrong?

I have to go along with Super Healer here and ask, where does it say this mount makes the epic flying skill Bind on Account?