World of Warcraft will introduce the WoW Token, a way for players to purchase game time for gold and buy gold for real money.
It is not free-to-play, but it’s close for some.
It was announced a week before Christmas along with a truckload of changes, most of which went live with 6.1: The “real money trading” in WoW is supposed to become legal very soon. However, this only works through Blizzard. It’s the same principle that games like Eve Online, ArcheAge, or WildStar use.
Price regulated by supply and demand
A player who has little gold but many euros can buy a “WoW Token” from Blizzard for a price that will be determined later. They can place this token in the auction house in WoW, in a special category there, for a price that they set themselves. It is regulated by supply and demand. So it may be that thirty days of WoW cost 40,000 gold on Tuesday and 60,000 on Wednesday, depending on how prices develop.
A player who has many euros but little gold can buy this token from the auction house and “redeem” it. Then the token disappears, and they receive thirty game days in return.
Win-Win-Win; only gold sellers are left empty-handed
The advantages for all parties involved are clear:
- Players can acquire gold for euros without violating the EULA and risking their account getting banned.
- Other players can play WoW for free and only pay with what they generate in-game – and all this can be done without any illegalities.
- And Blizzard sells the WoW Tokens and continues to collect the full amount of money for every player. Maybe some WoW players who are “rich in-game” but “not so much in real life” will also extend their subscriptions, and even from those, Blizzard gets money through a roundabout way. A different player pays for the free players.
The only losers here would be illegal gold sellers, who live off exchanging gold for euros and euros for gold while making a profit. However, experience in other games shows that they don’t really disappear but rather feel significantly more price pressure.
When the WoW Token will be released is still not entirely clear at the moment. But it is supposed to happen “soon.” Players should already pick the goblin they trust the least, advises Blizzard.
Mein MMO thinks: Probably many will start yelling “free-to-play” again in the next few days … although it is actually not, while for very rich players in-game, it turns out that way or even better. A similar trade was already possible in the past with a specific pet, the “Guardian Pup,” which could also be purchased in the real-money shop for euros and then sold for gold in the auction house. Basically, this is the next step, only that the other side does not just have a pet but game time.
In other, much smaller MMOs, this form of triangular trade has been long established. Now that the giant World of Warcraft is introducing this, it will be interesting to see what effects this has on such a long-established system where so much gold is in circulation. Surely there will also be lucrative gold sinks, like the black market AH, making it more attractive for Blizzard to give players an incentive to spend gold and get this trade going.
For those who still have questions about the system, Blizzard has prepared a small FAQ.
