Dear reader, I have a lot of positive words to say about World of Warcraft recently. The way Blizzard and its developers have clawed their way back from the pits of hell in Shadowlands is downright commendable, and the game is in one of the best states it's been in in years. Not perfect, mind you. Rewards systems are still a little wobbly, and there are your usual barrel of glitches, but it's all a damn sight better.
But that $90 dinosaur mount, temporarily added to the store, which had a huge quality of life feature slapped onto the side? It's the most brazenly, transparently-engineered microtransactional nonsense move I've seen out of the company in quite some time. It's utter and complete rot, selling a mobile auction house at a premium for a small window—so that those who bought in have a permanent advantage? Gross. Naturally, though, a ton of players bought them and paraded them around Dornogal in some kind of prehistoric frenzy.
Well, turns out, in an estimate by WoWHead, it probably made Blizzard millions of dollars. Nearly $17 million, though this number comes with some caveats, which I'll get into in a moment.
- WoW has raised over $2 million for charity CureDuchenne by selling a cute little fox, after being inspired by The Remarkable Life of Ibelin documentary
- Bobby Kotick says he'd never have raised World of Warcraft's subscription by even a dollar because 'it's a prickly audience, you don't wanna do too much to agitate them'
The data boffins over on the site used a combination of Data for Azeroth and Raider.io to estimate how much cash Blizzard raked in. As explained on the post itself, Data for Azeroth has data for about 1 million accounts, and while it doesn't have data for the game's Chinese servers, it does have ones for North America, Europe, Taiwan, and Korea. That's a solid sample size, regardless.
Raider.io, meanwhile, has a bigger sample of accounts, and also tracks certain achievements like, for example, Mythic+ top percentile tryhards. This is a good measuring tape, because getting into the top 0.1% of a Mythic+ season is life-alteringly hard and, while it's possible there are some sweats who have multiple characters on an account with the achievement, it's pretty unlikely.
Let's take the "Cryptic Hero: Shadowlands Season 3" achievement, for example—Raider.io states about 2,536 players out of the entire playerbase achieved it across all regions. Trouble is, the achievement only gives you the top 0.1% of all Mythic+ players.
That's where this other website comes in. While Data for Azeroth only has around 1 million accounts on it, it also states that 0.1689% of characters in its sample size (which doesn't care about whether you're a Mythic+ player or not) got the same achievement. So you can just take Raider.io's number—2,536, in this case—and assume it's proportionate to the site's sample. Then you divide 100 by 0.1689, times 2,536 by that number, and hey presto—you've got a guestimate of the entire playerbase.
Do this across a bunch of seasons, take the average, and you've got an estimate of around 1,550,890 accounts. Then you just grab Data for Azeroth's percentage of players who have the Brontosaur—around 12%—and use that bigger number to determine that roughly 188,289 players bought it. Times that by the cost of the mount, and you've got almost $17 million in Blizzard's pocket.
There are a couple of things that could skew the numbers here, mind, such as multiple characters on an account having the same achievement. It's also not a test that works for mounts which are parts of giveaways, Twitch drops, or so on, since neither site differentiates between players getting a freebie or paying out of pocket. You can also use actual in-game WoW gold to buy the mount via the WoW token—which can be bought from the Auction House, and then turned in for Battle.net balance.
Mind, supposing a majority of players had used WoW tokens, that'd still leave a few million in Blizzard's pocket. Even then, using WoW Tokens to convert gold to Blizzard bucks still means that someone, somewhere, bought those tokens in the first place—and for a more beneficial amount of money. You needed to buy around $120's worth of WoW Tokens, with in-game gold, to get the battle.net balance for a dinosaur.
Anyway, all this to say: Yes, Blizzard probably made an absurd amount of money from the FOMO dino. While I don't think this sort of silliness is particularly healthy for the customer—and I'm not defending Blizzard's choice to do it—I can't say I'm surprised that they do so considering how incapable we all are of voting with our wallets. That's a huge amount of moolah for not a lot of work, and you do need money to make, run, and continue to justify a game's existence. This might not be the microtransactional future we want, but I reckon it's the one we deserve, since we keep hucking money at digital dinosaurs.
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