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WildStar: Carbine Donates LEGO Rocket House to Child's Play
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
During last week's PAX East convention, Carbine Studios, developers of WildStar, donated a 50,000 piece LEGO rocket house to the Child's Play charity. The LEGO sculpture is a replica of the in-game rocket house that preorder customers will receive when the game goes live and it will be auctioned off in a forthcoming Child's Play event.
In addition to the LEGO sculpture, a $10,000 check was also presented to Child’s Play which will be donated to the Boston Children’s Hospital and the University of Massachusetts Children’s Medical Center.
“Child's Play is deeply grateful for the support of Carbine Studios and the WildStar team,” said Jamie Dillon, program coordinator and development, Child’s Play. “Creative, gamer-focused fundraising is the cornerstone of Child's Play and we're honored to be the recipient of both an incredible donation for two of our network hospitals as well as a work of LEGO art to be featured in our annual auction. These donations will allow us to provide video games to children who are in need of distraction, empowerment, entertainment and more. The contributions have a positive impact on the lives of hundreds of sick kids, and we are so grateful to Carbine Studios and WildStar for their donation.”
Souce: NCSoft-Carbine Studios press release
Find out more about WildStar.
Comments
Agree. Go Carbine.
In War - Victory.
In Peace - Vigilance.
In Death - Sacrifice.
well, lets see how much they make by selling one rocket chip.
just for the record (incase you run out of devs to like): blizz just raised a million for the make a wish charity thingie
"believe me, mike.. i calculated the odds of this working against the odds that i was doing something incredibly stupid and i did it anyway!"
Blizz has - what? - seven million people throwing $15/month at them? Shouldn't they be donating, not raising, $50 million to charity?
Either way, money goes to deserving charities. A round of good karma for all!
Okay, I'm sorry but I see Blizzard's things as nothing more than publicity scams. How so? They put up a digital pet/mount on their sale store and advertise that "part of the proceeds go to XXX charity". This sort of "charitable donation" gets customers into buying something that they'd normally not buy, where 50% is going to Blizzard and 50% is going to charity. So, instead of looking at it like "Blizzard donated $1 million to Make-A-Wish" instead look at it like "Blizzard peddled a charity's name to sell a digital pet and then pocketed 1/2 the sales while only giving 1/2 to said charity." Sorry that's so pessimistic, but it's honest.
Perfectly said.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Down rating Blizzards attempts at charity just because they are more successful is shameful.. seriously, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Blizzard, in total, gives more capital to charity than most, if not all, other game studios or publishers.. and it's consistent, every year. The more success WoW has, the more is given to charity... year after year. Don't try to use charity as another excuse to pig hate on them.. cos quite honestly you're all just talking shit. Jesus, Carbine could have just given money and be done with it.. but noooooo, they decided to put a giant big fucking (FREE) lego advert all over the MMO AND Child's Play news scene. You think a spot on every site this story will be posted on would have cost less than 10k? Cos I'm telling you, it would have cost a LOT more. AND!!! They issued their OWN press release to make sure everyone knew about it! Who gives a fuck? I don't, it's for a good cause, win/win... but stop bumming your favourite game. They are all the same in this regard, mutually beneficial. Embarrassed and ashamed to be associated with this group of people sometimes.... MMO players.. fuck me, some of you need to get a grip.
Well to be blunt, charity is often used by businesses as a way of generating a good image. A good image = more sales. It is sad but true.
Still, its not always used in such ways, and any contribution (even if done for a marketing standpoint) should at least be appreciated. Being creative with how they are donating does tend to show more of a desire to do something good for an organization and really shows effort was put into figuring out just what to do to donate to a worthy cause.
Okay, I understand charity events are great and all, but I think we all need to take the blinders off and be realistic her. They didn't get nothing out of their "charity" when they sold digital cash shop items; they doubled down with not only getting good publicity (a great thing for a company, whether intentional or not), but also got over $1 million extra to pocket.
How much does it cost for Blizzard to make a mini-pet digital item -usually one that mimics an already in-game model- and sell it in their own digital store? I'm at assumption that it's not $1million, not even close. Maybe at most it would be like $.50 per each sold (roughly $100,000). That would covered initial costs and given $1.9 million to the charity mentioned.
Why didn't they do that? Because they're a business who's goal is to make money. The charity event/sale was using the labeled name of a charity to sell cash shop items to make them money. For every one of the $10 pets, $5 was bank for Blizzard and only $5 was for charity.
Press for charities is okay for companies and good on them. The charity gets its name out and the company gets their product out there too. However there is still a huge difference between making a donation to a charity in the name of your product/company and instead selling an extra item where "a portion of sales goes to charity". This is especially true on a bank making subscription game that peddles cash shop items
And the only reason that I'm bringing this up is that every time a developer from another company does something charity related, some comment has to pop up that says "but Blizzard donated XXX to charity XXX this past year". They do it every year to boost their coffers, increase revenue, and get the free publicity, that's it. That's the only reason they do it. If they really, truly, honestly cared about the causes that they "support", then they'd do more than give 50% of some new digital item they have made up purposely for their annual money scheme.
But didn't Blizzard make a profit off the "Make a Wish" cash shop pet thing?
Dont get me wrong, I'm glad they donated 50% of the sales. But I would have been much more impressed if they would have donated 100% of the sales for the pixel pet.
Anyways
Gratz to Carbine
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Yeh, carbines promotional press statement and video about this selfless donation really sets them apart from those being accused of something like that ^
Just before launch as well.. who would have thought??
Typical MMO fan bollocks.. fine when their messiah does it, evil when Blizzard does it. You're all the lowest members of the human race in terms of intelligence and cognitive reasoning. At least Blizzard has the balls to say upfront what the real deal is.