WoW Adds New Purchasable Mount - Winged Guardian

[zehydra]

Real money for digital items, Blizzard devs are evil geniuses.

Ah well, cue people bitching on the WoW forms, even though this is an optional item, and threating to stop playing. People will still pay for it, and Blizz will be crying all the way to the bank.

EDIT: Hell, I'd pay $25 or more if I could add wings to my Mammoth. They should add that.

"evil geniuses", it's what people have been doing on MMOs and even Facebook games! Blizzard is just following suit.

 

[GrimSheeper]

So they are switching to microtransactions...while also keeping the monthly fee up. I guess everyone and their grandmother are wishing for a time machine to buy the majority of stocks from Blizzard shortly after they published The Lost Vikings and then keep on making money, fame and more money as the good games roll in.
It would eriously help me out right now to own half of Activision and probably Europe with the money I made from Blizzard. WoW alone probably rakes in the BIP of a small country by now, even though it seems to slowly peak with Cataclysm.

But 25$ for a mount? That's just...way too much. Nobody forces anyone to buy anything, of course. Still, that's a lot of money for a single item with a bit of animation work a team like Blizzard probably threw together in the lunch break.

 

[Sean951]

So they are switching to microtransactions...while also keeping the monthly fee up. I guess everyone and their grandmother are wishing for a time machine to buy the majority of stocks from Blizzard shortly after they published The Lost Vikings and then keep on making money, fame and more money as the good games roll in.
It would eriously help me out right now to own half of Activision and probably Europe with the money I made from Blizzard. WoW alone probably rakes in the BIP of a small country by now, even though it seems to slowly peak with Cataclysm.

But 25$ for a mount? That's just...way too much. Nobody forces anyone to buy anything, of course. Still, that's a lot of money for a single item with a bit of animation work a team like Blizzard probably threw together in the lunch break.

No, the MMOs that run off micro transaction sell gear and by extension, the newest content to be patched in. They also sell in game money, experience, and anything else people want. Blizzard sells 2 different mounts at 2 different times and various non-combat pets, also at different times and in several cases with the money going to a charitable foundation (Make-A-Wish if I remember correctly).

 

[Auxiliary]

Activision is quite shameless. Charging 15 bucks a months for updating the game, hosting the servers while in truth they can keep the servers running for years on a single month of fees. Usually companies stick to one business-model. Activision-Blizzard decides to make use of all of them. B2P, Expansions, Cashshop, Premium Services (transfers, race change, etc), Subscription, Mobile Apps and so on. I guess it is good to be nr. 1.

 

[Grunt_Man11]

If only they put as much effort into developing patches as they did in coming up with ways to try to nickel and dime their players, then maybe patch 4.1 wouldn't have sucked so bad.

 

[PinochetIsMyBro]

Ah Blizzard, reminding me again why I quit WoW once the first expansion was announced and never looked back.

 

[Vrach]

I like playing WoW as much as my schedule permits, but I don't think I would ever purchase a downloadable piece of content like this. But c'est la vie.

It's pretty much a link in the dictionary next to the definition of "cash-in" and "ripoff".

The real question is, how is this news? No real discussion being promoted, nothing really relevant, just another item in the store of the MMO giant (not even the first of it's kind) and I don't see Escapist being in the business of marketing such things.

 

[Raizekage]

I love the way the mount looks. If I still played I'd get it.

 

[thisbymaster]

I knew this was coming, I am waiting for them to have combat mounts that need to have custom armor on them.

 

[squid5580]

Real money for digital items, Blizzard devs are evil geniuses.

Ah well, cue people bitching on the WoW forms, even though this is an optional item, and threating to stop playing. People will still pay for it, and Blizz will be crying all the way to the bank.

EDIT: Hell, I'd pay $25 or more if I could add wings to my Mammoth. They should add that.

"evil geniuses", it's what people have been doing on MMOs and even Facebook games! Blizzard is just following suit.

Sure except that fb games and free mmos that charge money for this kind of shit are free. There is no 60 dollar (plus expansion price) investment. there is no $15 monthly fee. do you see the difference here?

And with every Zynga game you can actually earn real money currency by playing the games. Think about that

 

[Tom Phoenix]

It's astounding! It's amazing! It's, best of all, free to use with no mods required! Ladies and gentlemen! Celebrate! Dance on the rooftops! For the age of TRL, That Retarded Lion, has arrived!

 

[zehydra]

Real money for digital items, Blizzard devs are evil geniuses.

Ah well, cue people bitching on the WoW forms, even though this is an optional item, and threating to stop playing. People will still pay for it, and Blizz will be crying all the way to the bank.

EDIT: Hell, I'd pay $25 or more if I could add wings to my Mammoth. They should add that.

"evil geniuses", it's what people have been doing on MMOs and even Facebook games! Blizzard is just following suit.

Sure except that fb games and free mmos that charge money for this kind of shit are free. There is no 60 dollar (plus expansion price) investment. there is no $15 monthly fee. do you see the difference here?

And with every Zynga game you can actually earn real money currency by playing the games. Think about that

Fair enough.

@Zynga comment, REALLY? Did not know that. That's insane.

 

[Baneat]

its not that theyre 'running out' but i think they have employees manually activating them.

As for prestige, "I have $25" never really seemed like something worth bragging.

I dunno..

Someone needs to post the youtube video of this mount's song, I don't know how to embed videos into posts.


*I have the celestial steed, I didn't buy it, someone traded me it for gold (Not as much as you'd think based on chinese gold prices) - Yeah, they suck.

 

[boholikeu]

its not that theyre 'running out' but i think they have employees manually activating them.

As for prestige, "I have $25" never really seemed like something worth bragging.

However"I was prepared to pug Tempest keep for 2 years straight, but only had do run it for 3 months and now i ride on a blazing phoenix and am better than all'a 'yall" THATS something i take pride in flaunting. =P And once you have an Ashes of Alar, any other flying mount, aside from a Mimi's head, or Onyxian Drake just doesnt really have any impact. =P

Not everyone gets vanity items like mounts for the "prestige" involved.

And morons are going to buy this shit while african kids die of starvation. This useless cosmetic non-existant thing is going to rake in obscene amounts of money (I mean, it's not like you could give the money to charity right?). Quite funny actually, I'm curious as to how much money this'll make.

Can you honestly say you've never made a totally useless purchase like this? It's not that much different from someone buying a figurine of some sort, or paying extra for something because it "looks nicer" than the other options.

 

[BabyRaptor]

Much, MUCH more interested in the 8 new tamables they announced earlier. I don't often find myself compelled to put out more money than my subscription fee, but I would pay for more pet slots.

 

[DaHero]

and so it begins, can I get a flame shield before going back on WoW? Anyone got one to spare?

 

[boholikeu]

Spoiler: lots of people saying this isn't worth the money

25$ is pretty outrageous but I guess if someone likes WoW enough, and has enough disposable income, then it's not really any of my business.

I just don't understand why anyone would pay 25$ for something like this.. There are soooo many things i'd rather spend those money on.

Well that looks awful, not as bad as sparkle pony, but still awful.

I was shocked when so many people spent $25 on sparkle pony, I still can't see why people will buy this. $25 puts you half way to a new game and the mount is purely cosmetic. If people will pay for it I can't fault Blizzard for selling it.

I am getting a good laugh out of the people on the WoW forums calling this "a desperate move" and a sign that "the game is going downhill".

But 25$ for a mount? That's just...way too much. Nobody forces anyone to buy anything, of course. Still, that's a lot of money for a single item with a bit of animation work a team like Blizzard probably threw together in the lunch break.

saw these ingame today, this is worth more then the celestial steed by far.

not 25 euros, but still more then the crappy horse.

It's pretty much a link in the dictionary next to the definition of "cash-in" and "ripoff".

The real question is, how is this news? No real discussion being promoted, nothing really relevant, just another item in the store of the MMO giant (not even the first of it's kind) and I don't see Escapist being in the business of marketing such things.

First That Retarded Horse, now this retarded lion.

So they are switching to microtransactions...

Nah. This is just something they dish out once in a while for people with more money than sense.

I love Blizzard to death, and I love WoW... but it boggles my mind to imagine paying $25 for a stupid mount. It's not even a cool mount! Sheesh.

People are dumb.

To all the following people who say this is a ripoff:

$25 actually isn't that bad when you consider how long it takes most people to earn $25 in real life as opposed to how long it would take them to grind rep/older dungeons for an equally cool mount in game.

 

[A_who]

Is that Kimarhi? Seriously though design doesn't appeal to me and I don't think I would pay for a mount especially since there are so many more mounts in game I haven't got.

 

[VanQ]

If I still played WoW, I would probably have bought it. Luckily, I gave up at the beginning of the year. Nearly 6 months clean, the longest I had ever gone before was 2 months. This isn't enough to make me go back though. I'm saving my cash for Guild Wars 2 and Firefall. Incidentally, the latter of those is free.

 

[DanDeFool]

The Winged Guardian will still set you back 25 bones, but good luck trying to buy one in the next few days. The Celestial Steed had a queue of over 80,000 people waiting to get the digital delivery, and the comments over at the official Blizzard site [http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2878502#c-2592971571] is any indication there is already a waiting list 3,000 strong.

This is the only part of the article that stood out to me, because I can totally understand how people would want to pay extra to have an elite mount, but how in the name of bollock burgers do you have a waiting list for digital goods? Is it some kind of game balance thing?

This reminds me of why I would never buy movie downloads from Amazon; they were always out of licenses. I thought that was the whole point of digital distribution! You no longer have to worry about having a finite number of items to sell, since you're no longer selling a physical object.

Not that those two are necessarily the same, but they are equally incomprehensible to me.