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WOD $49.99? seriously?
baphamet
Member RarePosts: 3,311
i am sure this has been asked before but honestly.....$49.99 for an expansion? not a full game, but an expansion???
i know it's wow and blizz shits golden nuggests but that's just getting a little ridiculous IMO
Comments
They have to charge something. They paid billions to split from the parent company.
They would attract more people if the expansion included all previous expansions like SOE does, but they don't.
blizz can put $59.95 price tag for wod and people still will buy it.
The last expansion (MoP) was also $49.99 at launch, I believe Cataclysm was too. As for WoTLK and TBC I honestly can't remember that far back - they may have been $59.99...
This ^
Blizzard could slap that price tag on a turd and people would still pay it. And they have, with diablo III. There are some nice features from what I've seen coming w/ this expansion, but it's nothing too huge either. However, that is fairly standard pricing when it comes to Blizzard.
They throw a lot of money at their games, so yes, they expect a lot back in return.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
I'd concur that the price of this expansion is a bit over the top when compared to their usual "39.99" price tag for expansions. They say it's because WoD is bigger than any other expansion (despite having less new features) and that you get a free 90 ($60 value) with it. Though it isn't really free if you have to pay that extra $10 in my opinion. Seems like a mandatory purchase of a 90 at significantly reduced price if someone were to use that logic with it.
Though since they split with Vivendi, they are in great need to start recooperating that deal (and sadly, it seems like the fans are going to help with the bill with extra costs and cash shops with the way things are going at the moment). One thing that is true (or at least they said) is that their team is roughly double the size it was when they were working on the Mists of Pandaria expansion. With all the new graphics and models and new buildings and systems (not features), it's likely to be true as a whole.
Though as people have said before, they could probably get away with $60 for the expansion. People will buy it and play it without question.
If you knew how difficult the whole process of updating character models is you would know that 50 bucks isn't even that much. There are very few companies like Blizzard who are doing such an amazing job in keeping a 9 year old game up to date.
If the rumors I've heard are true ( no content additions in over a year) while charging sub fees, I'd say people have put in a significant amount toward those updates already.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Are you serious? It doesn't take long at all. A year at the most. They've waited 6 years to do it, and that's unacceptable for any company. They just wanted to wait until the time was right, when their sub numbers were going down.
I do question why we're paying $50 instead of $40 for an expansion that has had, by far, the longest development cycle and is going to have the least amount of new features and new zones to date.
That being said, I'll probably pay it... hence I'm answering my own damn question, but it's leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Blizzard has begun to employ very EA-style business model and practices. $10 extra on an expansion isn't the only thing. Putting mounts on the cash shop that *should* be in game (like the racial lore mounts that appear everywhere in WoD, but are only availible for real dollars) and the Ashran fiasco (namely their insistence that the art department doesn't have the time to make it work despite having no problem making a metric fuckton of cash-shop crap work) are all starting to take their toll on my opinion of Blizzard.
At this point, I feel they are straight up trading customer loyalty for cold hard cash. I'm at the point where all Blizzard has to do is slip up once and release a truly subpar product, and I'll be filing them in the hazard zone along with EA... never to be purchased from.
Or because release after release, it stands to be the best option in the MMO market...
all their other expansions have been $40, this one is the first to be $50 to my knowledge.
When WoD goes live in October or November it will be more than a year, 14 months to be precise, without any new content given to the players.
People claiming that Blizzard's pricing policy is just should contemplate on this.
Apart from Blizzard always delivering QUALITY AND QUANTITY for their products,... so it is worth the price,... why don't you google WOD and find the game for half the price on about every reseller site?
Paying the "official" price on the mainpage is almost always the most expensive price possible. Not only in gaming, but every buisiness.
MMOs finally replaced social interaction, forced grouping and standing in a line while talking to eachother.
Now we have forced soloing, forced questing and everyone is the hero, without ever having to talk to anyone else. The evolution of multiplayer is here! We won,... right?
Try to imagine how many copies they will sell WORLD WIDE, than multiply it by 49.99 and ask yourself if you think that their production/development costs even comes near that number. Everything that is for sale usually goes by the rule of the more you sell the cheaper the product can get only games, movies, music seems to not roll that way which is a joke.