€78 ($90) mount is now available for World of Warcraft - more than three times more expensive than anything else
Can you even call it microtransactions anymore?
Here's the link to the store page.
I have never bought a cosmetic in any game, ever, but this is absolutely insane to me, especially for World of Warcraft which usually had somewhat measured pricing on their real-money cosmetics (everything has always been below €25 to my knowledge) - that it's fully cosmetic is debatable though, seeing as you now have an auction house and mailbox wherever you are. Not all that game changing to be sure, but it's definitely a small advantage over those that are not rich in money or in-game currency.
There is an argument to be made that it's a way to influence the economy in the game - another gold-sink to reduce the huge wealth gap between players (it will cost nearly two million gold to reach the Battle.net balance required). However, two million gold is not that much.
I'm not quite dusting off my pitchfork over it, mind you, but still. And I just wanted to share to maybe foster some quality discussion on tildes about microtransactions maybe?
Thanks for the tags @mycketforvirrad, didn't really know what to put.
imo the important thing is that there's still a large range of cheaper cosmetics, but having a couple cosmetics be really expensive is a win-win. As long as it's not promoting gambling, it's basically a way to let people with extra money subsidize development for people without. Like if it's do this or increase subscription rate, ABSOLUTELY do this!
personally I refuse to even spend $5 on a discord profile animation cosmetic and I'm in discord like 12 hours a day or more and I absolutely adore some of their cosmetics BUT thats fine, if they introduced a $500 cosmetic I'd be in favor of that too
That’s not what I am concerned about.
What bothers me is that this sends a message that virtual scarcity is a more lucrative business than actually developing gameplay. Concrete big-name example: GTA V was supposed to get a massive single player expansion but it was scrapped when they found out they can charge teenagers for virtual Ferraris in the online mode. Why would you ever develop a proper game when you can just milk a franchise for cosmetics for decades?
There was an interesting thread about this on /r/games where people basically argued that they no longer buy new games because they’re hooked on Wow, LoL, GTA V or some mobile gatcha mill. And we see big AAA publishers basically abandon single player games left and right as they not only make less money than “service” multiplayer games but nobody even has time for them anymore.
Excuse the snobby wording but to me, that’s a cultural loss. It basically makes an entire medium work in service of a single section of the brain dedicated to addiction or status-seeking. It’s a tragic loss, IMO, one that already swallowed mobile gaming whole and now does the same with big-budget PC and console gaming. Yes, there’s commendable exceptions (indies, Nintendo, occasional prestige releases by AAA studios) but the trend is clear and accelerating. Nothing about human nature suggests we’ll ever snap out of this while it’s offered. Basically, at this rate, there will be no more AAA single player games by 2040. And yes, that’s because of $90 mounts in WoW.
My only argument against this is that there are some people in this world who agree with you, and some of those people know how to make games. Will they be more scarce and difficult to find? Probably. But they will be there.
I don't blame you for being cynical, and I don't disagree with any of your other points, but people will continue to make cool shit for the sake of making cool shit. I have to believe that.
The people you are describing make indie games, not AAA.
Personally I think the indie scene blows major titles out of the water.
The mount has the option to access the auction house. And as far as I'm concerned that option is only available to mounts that require being purchased. So in essence, while the plebs are out there running back to their major cities to buy, sell and trade. The "in-game elite", can just chill on a sunny beach, watching the sunset and sip their cocktails.
And yes, I know, I'm known for hyperbolic reasoning but you get the point :P
this is the only mount with that feature or there are other paid mounts with this feature?
In my understanding there are other paid mounts that offer this option. But I might be wrong in assuming that there are no in-world alternatives out there. But I can do a quick google and figure out if my initial post was useless.
Edit: from my limited research, this option only exists for paid mounts and thus not available for those who already paid to buy the game and are paying an active subscription.
There is one other mount that allows for it: it was a limited time mount during BfA that cost 5 million gold back then. It occasionally pops up on the black market auction house now, however it's super rare and costs gold cap (10 million gold) when it does appear.
So yes, realistically, there is only this one €78/$90 mount.
As said elsewhere, there are in-game options that do this that cost in-game currency. And a few other non-transaction mounts that offer some of the features. Based on my experience, use of them isn't locked to the owner, so people will simply flock to these mounts when they seem them and reap the benefits without having wasted the money.
Granted, those folks can't immediately summon the mount to use it, but most of those features are like at most a 15 minutes flight from nearly everywhere to a hub city.
It's a logical fallacy apparently but I think the main argument is that it's a slippery slope. Paying for QoL features is a lot different from something that truly is cosmetic and has zero gain.
About Discord, they recently limited file uploads to 10mb, down from 25mb. So now you'd have to purchase nitro to be able to upload videos longer than 30 seconds which.. ugh. Leads me (and friends I've talked to) that they are going to be selling out very soon.
For discord, charging money to store files is perfectly reasonable? It’s more insane to expect them to perpetually store all your files of any size for free - that’s a service that entire companies are built off of (eg, Dropbox).
10mb is reasonable for what they want, which is an easy way for people to share quick reaction gifs, not be a video host.
It’s a chat service that you don’t even pay for to use. They no doubt lose oodles of money every month, which is their choice, but you can hardly expect the gravy train to last forever.
I suppose all of that is true. Every other social media I use is free though so maybe I've just been coddled by that - and that those ones are easily able to handle bigger files (or at least compress them enough to still be able to send). As it is currently, I simply edit my video into multiple 30 second clips and then send them that way if I really want to show someone something I videoed. So storing files just becomes 10+10+10 (or whatever) instead of 25mb from before.
But yes. We are probably on the last spoonfuls of gravy so to speak lol - maybe other social medias will start to get paid in the near future too?
Slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy, it's a rhetorical one. I wouldn't even call it a "fallacy" per se, it's just not very convincing rhetorically. Where there are logical fallacies in slippery slope arguments it's usually some form of non sequitur or post hoc ergo propter hoc, the first being unestablished casual connections between events, and the second being the assumption that because one thing precedes another in time, the former must've caused the latter. In both cases, the causality of the events in question is assumed rather than established.
There can be situations in which slippery slope is convincing, but almost never by itself. It works best as inductive support for other more deductive premises. Where SS is used as the sole argument, you can usually find alarmism, pessimism, or deception in attendance. Either that, or the person arguing it is having trouble explicating a stronger, more deductive argument, and has landed on slippery slope as the next best thing.
In this case I don't think the slippery slope is especially convincing, because the argument doesn't take into account the influence of broader market forces. Yes, AAA developers have a short-term incentive to focus on cosmetics and gambling-adjacent mechanics, but in the case that AAA totally abandons single-player, narratively focused games, that leaves a vacuum in the market to fulfill demand for that type of product. Smaller devs and indies will likely rush to meet that demand, even though the margins for profit aren't as great, and some of them will inevitably enjoy runaway success. That in turn will alert the big boys that there's an underserved demand, and they too will jump in to capitalize on it. We've already seen this process play out a few times at various scales over the 50 or so years of commercial video game development, and I don't see any particular reason to suppose this time will be much different.
There's no doubt in my mind that the AAA space is in for some rough times in the near future–the chaotic flurry of acquisitions followed by downsizing in recent years seems like a bellwether to that–but I'm not so pessimistic about the industry as a whole.
For one thing, videogaming as an industry has some traits that simply don't have analogues in other media or consumer industries. The absolute rock bottom barrier for entry is one. If you have the knowledge and ability to work with code, you can with luck and perseverance develop a runaway success of a game. You don't need hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the next Stardew Valley or Vampire Survivors and launch or reinvigorate entire genres. Compare that to cinema, where the realistic barrier to entry runs into the low millions, or consumer electronics, where the barrier is more like the hundreds of millions. One could conceivably pay $300 for a used laptop, a few bucks for electricity, and nothing to "borrow" Internet access from McDonald's or your local library and have everything needed to produce a title that will sell a million-plus copies. It takes a helluva lotta effort and luck, but it has been done before.
The only thing AAA-scale development adds is the ability to scale. That can open up new artistic possibilities, particularly in multiplayer gaming, but mostly all it does is improve certain aspects of quality. With a big budget you can hire many more modelers and environmental artists to add detail and foster immersion, and QA teams to help improve performance (a problem which is itself largely an effect of scaling) and fix bugs. These aren't nothing, but they aren't crucial to gaming as a medium, and very few things that scale can contribute are.
Scale also brings with it complications, foremost among them risk. A couple hundred million dollars is a lot of eggs to throw into a single basket, so big developers have grown increasingly more risk-averse. That as much as anything has led AAA to where they are today, and I think it's probably the single biggest motivating force behind things like a focus on live service, cosmetics, and microtransactions. Companies see multiple vectors for revenue as risk-management strategies, but they have difficulty in balancing them with other elements that consumers value more because they simply have too much riding on averting catastrophe. A bedroom developer doesn't experience that sort of pressure because even if their game does nowhere, they're likely to have considered it a hobby project with value to themselves outside of its commercial potential. "Sure, nobody bought my game, but I learned a lot about using Godot while I was making it, so that's cool."
I cannot agree with this. I quit WoW back in Shadowlands 9.1, and the increasing cost of everything in the shop was one of the reasons. One of the reason to playing MMO, for me personally, is the drive to collect as many things from the game as I can. When a good portion of those things cost as much as other regular games it drove me off.
Need I remind you that WoW is not a free game? You pay for the game, for the expansion, and for the subscription. To have a cash shop on top of all that is already questionable, to have something in the cash shop more expensive than most AAA games? There is only one word for this: greed.
well to clarify, I am talking about pure cosmetics with no gameplay modifications. it sounds like this isn't exactly that, so I'm a bit more mixed, but I also don't understand precisely what it does do and why that's important
making people pay for gameplay, I do not approve of, although I did play a gacha game for a few years and I did spend money on it, but it was very transparent about what you were getting into from day 1
No, we shouldn't. Games journalists should start using the term "upsale" instead of "microtransaction" for anything over $5. I've suggested this on reddit, but never gotten much traction.
Posted this before looking at r/wow today. People are definitely raising their pitchforks over there lol
In so tired of the MO. They absolutely know that their price is outrageous. They know there are idiots who will buy it. They know the only thing between those idiots’ money and them is community scorn. So they do a shock-and-awe tactic, charging the absolute maximum they think anyone ever would pay (or rather the price at which enough people would buy to maximize profits), await the inevitable community backlash (who knows, maybe nobody would have noticed), put out a “we listen to our fans” statement, generously slash the price in half and end up with still the most ridiculously priced cosmetic item in their catalog while the community feels like it had an impact and they can claim that they listened.
I’ve seen this over and over and over again in gaming.
Hahahahaha, let me introduce you to MechWarrior Online.
...Or any Eastern European/Russian made mobile game.
Not downplaying your point, just pointing out how ridiculous so called microtransactions are in many places.
Planetside 2 was another one, but the prices weren't totally unreasonable, there were just a lot of cosmetics, so it could easily become a silly thing....but they also shared profits with the players who created cosmetics, which was actually pretty cool.
The counterpoint is that MWO is free to play. WoW requires buying the game, the expansions, and then a subscription for the privilege to play the game you've
purchasedrented a license to.Yeah that's fair enough. MWO can get pretty expensive even for a F2P game though (don't ask how I know xD).
In Planetside 2, I may have paid $60 for a single skin in a bundle. ...More than once... 😳
I don't generally care about cosmetics in games as MTX (or "macro"-transactions). If people want to buy them, let them. Generally speaking, I'm only against MTX when the item in question is a) unavailable to those who don't pay real money, AND b) it gives some kind of advantage over other players.
That said, I'm OK with things like XP boosters in Planetside. In Eve, the skill injectors I'm OK with. Or like FFXIV and I think GW2, you can buy things that allow you to skip ahead in the story and raise your character's level to the minimum required for a DLC. I say that because those don't give a player game mechanic knowledge. They may not know how to play the game, even with higher level items, equip, etc. Like in Eve, people who start the game as "credit card warriors," can get ships and such that would take a "regular" player years to get. But it doesn't mean they know how to use those things. The credit card warrior typically loses that stuff pretty quickly.
Blizzard price things locally so it's 1/3 of the price for me, but I still don't think about buying it. Mind you, I have bought a couple of mounts and a few other items from the store before, but this just feels wrong to me because it's transparently cynical. Using the game's anniversary as a cover to release an item that cost the same as a AAA game for a limited time is quite the move, but as long as they don't sell some tokens that let you buy an item you can only get through playing (like Mythic armor sets etc.), I can turn a blind eye to what this is.
I'm not feeling much outrage over this one.
First off, WoW is an MMO with a weird economy. The community repeatedly demonstrated that they wanted to pay real money for gold via ToS-breaking third party transactions, which is really difficult to police, so about 9 years ago Blizzard added official support via the WoW Token. You can buy one for $20 USD and then either sell it to other players for in-game gold at the market rate or redeem it as game-time or $15 blizzard credit -- and that credit can then be spent on stuff like this mount. The token price fluctuates a lot, but it's currently going for around 276,000 gold in NA. So, if you've got the gold (enough for 6 tokens, which is 1.65 million gold currently), you can acquire the mount without spending a dime of real money.
Second, they released another version of this mount years ago for 5,000,000 gold, which is currently the equivalent of about $360. This one is both better and a steal in comparison, no matter how you're paying for it.
Third, this mount is most useful for players obsessively playing the auction house, i.e. players who get their fun by gold-making and likely can easily afford this with their current gold stash anyway.
I have enough gold to afford it but it's neither worth the gold nor the cash to me, so meh. The dozens (hundreds?) of $30 skins in Diablo 4 that can only be obtained with RMT annoy me a lot more than this one.
Call me cheap, but I wouldn't spend money on cosmetic stuff. The only time when I spend money in game was back in the day in TF2 to play on official server (Mann vs Machine it was?) and I spend that money to be able to play with people that were also dedicated to spend money. This made all the people in the game to try and cooperate amd win together basically meaning paying for better experience. I got some cosmetic stuff at the end, but I did it for the unmatched gaming experience.
Well, I guess I spent money on Horse armor back in he day when I bought Oblivion DLC DVD...
But ever since? I'm cheap! I don't care if I have the latest stuff and look cool, I just want to play. So reading about such thing as this mount for 78€, I'd rather put the money on the side and soon I will buy me a Steam Deck. Or new GPU. Or a few full games!
For over 8 years they've been pretty macro
I don't spend a lot on cosmetics in games, but, it's certainly non-zero. My justification to myself is: If I'm willing to spend X amount on physical clothing which will be seen by people T amount of time, I'm willing to spend Y amount on virtual clothing will be seen by people T2 amount of time. I think of it as roughly the same: I'm paying to look good. Also factor in how much time a given gamer might spend in-game vs in public.
Also: If a business finds something that people are willing to pay for, and it isn't harmful, that just seems like good business sense. So, the issue is probably less that it's outrageous that a business will sell something some people think is poor or no value, and more that some people will pay that much for something that others think has no value.