MMORPG.com's Justin Webb dedicates his column this week to the brouhaha surrounding the recent release of the Celestial Steed to the Blizzard Pet Store.
In this article I’m going to talk about the Celestial Steed. I’m going to mention the resulting significant shift in the social dynamics of WoW; how to make nickel and diming “fun”; and the double standard that gets applied to Blizzard by the gaming press. Then I might make some inflammatory remarks like “Blizzard’s next MMO will be F2P” and allude to “slippery slopes”. Rabid Wolverines will also be mentioned.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Blizzard recently put a new item in their virtual store – the Celestial Steed. For 25 bucks, WoW players can now buy a spiffy all-in-one scalable mount.
This news was met in the gaming press with a resounding “meh”, seemingly requiring little further analysis or investigation beyond the fact that the Steed existed. Stories concentrated almost exclusively on how busy the store was, how much money it was making per hour, and that there was a queue … and that the queue was long. Some articles tried to do the math, with the current best guesses at somewhere between 2 and 4 million dollars of juicy virtual horseflesh traded. And there was an overtly patronizing tone in the gaming press as if anyone who bought a horsey must be an idiot. And that’s where the conversation stopped.
Read My Little Pony.
