10 October 2011

Testing Diablo III real-money model in World of Warcraft

Here we go, Diablo III was delayed to 2012 but its economy model is already moving the first steps in another environment: World of Warcraft. Blizzard recently added -for the first time- a BOE (bind on equip) vanity item purchasable on the Blizzard store for 10$ (source):

The Guardian Cub is a tradable, one-time-use pet that permanently binds to a single character upon use. When you purchase the Guardian Cub from the online store, the character you designate will receive a bind-on-use item to carry in his or her inventory

Few weeks ago Blizzard (randomly) posted on the official forums that they are not particularly interest in adding a real money AH to WoW. After all, this is something that would require a lot of work and it's just unlikely to happen. Much like gender change, faction change, and flying in Azeroth, ... What?

By offering a legal way to trade real money (store item) for ingame currency (gold), Blizzard is just testing the market and the players. Rare pets usually sell for thousands golds and I don't see why a 10$ item should go for less. I predict 20K-50K minimum for the Guardian Cub.

Will customers spend 10$ and sell the vanity item on the AH? If the answer is yes and people show great interest... expect a RMAH patch for WoW soon™.

Posted by Loque Nahak at 19:41
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5 comments:

  1. This definitely looks like the PLEX strategy for EVE put in WoW.. It will be interesting to see how well its used...

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  2. It's still impossible to move (real) money outside the game, of course... and deflation will kill the "profits". But it's just the first step, in my opinion.

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  3. 10 USD buys you between 7k and 10k gold. If you can sell the cub for more gold than double that, you have a money machine:

    Buy pet for 10 USD
    Sell for 30k gold
    Sell the 30k gold for 15 USD
    Repeat

    The above is assuming a buy/sell price of 1.00/0.5 USD/1k gold.

    And I don't think there will be a RMAH in WOW, but it would be nice to see ingame gametime items, like in Eve :)

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  4. The above is assuming you actually use external websites, because if you do not... the gold/dollar conversion will be decided ingame.

    Buying gold is risky and can definitely compromise your account.

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  5. Blizzard are sly foxes. I'll be interested to see how this evolves. What would be true genius, though, would be a way to allow players to sell their items and gold for real money. Umm... just like in Diablo 3. That might just bring me back to WoW.

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