Hearthstone's been around for a decade now, which is an awfully long time for a videogame. It's understandably not the behemoth it was back in its prime, although Blizzard reassured players in July that despite some less-than-ideal impressions, the game is not dying. And to prove it, Blizzard has done an absolutely normal thing for a game that's not dying and added a wee little fire-faced man who sits at the bottom of your screen, which you can have for your very own for just $60.
This is in fact Ragnaros the Firelord, the powerful Elemental Lord of Fire—a big deal (and a big problem) in World of Warcraft. He's somewhat more diminutive in Hearthstone, although he's still rocking an unnecessarily aggressive attitude. But at the end of the day, he's still just a little face sitting at the bottom of your Hearthstone screen, occasionally yelling at you and bonking or getting bonked, depending on how things are going.
You can see the Hearthstone version of Ragnaros in action courtesy of this gameplay video posted by Hearthstone caster and content creator Brian Kibler:
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To be fair, the Mythic Ragnaros the Firelord Bundle, is a fully animated 3D skin, and the only one useable by two classes: Warrior and Shaman. The bundle also includes three Shaman card packs and three Warrior packs. Technically, yes, that mitigates the price of the skin somewhat, in the sense that if you wanted to buy those packs separately you would have to pay for them—a bundle of seven standard packs goes for $10, which isn't nothing. But for most Hearthstone players it seems to have simply added to the annoyance.
Because annoyance, and sometimes more intense emotions, seems to be the most common reaction to the skin. With or without a handful of card packs, $60 for Ragnaros is a hell of a price. A post in the current top thread on the Hearthstone subreddit calls it a "sleazy money grab," while others decry it as simply squeezing the last drops out of the lemon before Microsoft shuts Hearthstone down at some point in the relatively near future. There's genuine anger to be seen, but a lot of it is not so much outrage as fatalism, which is perhaps inevitable given Hearthstone's slow decline into decrepitude.
But the $60 skin is not necessarily a sign of impending doom: It might simply reflect the fact that, hey, people buy this stuff. Diablo 4 has pulled in more than $150 million on microtransactions, which let us not forget comes on top of the $50 price for the base game; weapon cosmetics in Valorant are infamously expensive, but people keep throwing money at them. Spectre Divide launched earlier this month with a $90 pack of gun skins, which briefly caused outrage (it's a brand-new game, after all) so developer Mountaintop Studios reduced it to $70—which, to avoid any confusion, is still a hell of a pile of money to make your in-game thing look different.
Does it suck? Absolutely, and the endless drive to monetize everything that moves is probably going to do far more harm than good in the long run. But setting aside the rapaciousness of it all, in the short-term context this $60 skin might at least indicate that Blizzard has plans to support Heartstone in other, less annoying ways as well.
