Kotaku 
Enter your username and password.
Denver, 7:21 PM
Sat Nov 28
27 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip us:
Editor-In-Chief:
Brian Crecente
| AIM | Twitter
Deputy Editor:
Stephen Totilo
| AIM | Twitter
Senior Editor:
Michael McWhertor
| AIM | Twitter
Senior Contributing Editor, Japan:
Brian Ashcraft
| AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editor, East Coast:
Michael Fahey
| AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editor, Oceania:
Luke Plunkett
| AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editor, Weekends:
Owen Good
| AIM | Twitter
Correspondent, San Francisco:
AJ Glasser
| AIM | Twitter
Columnist:
Leigh Alexander
Columnist:
Tim Rogers
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
11/25/09
11/25/09
11/25/09
11/25/09
It speaks so well of the gamer community.
11/25/09
11/25/09
You're simply pathetic. There is nothing funny about your comments - they're not witty, nor intelligent. You have achieved so little in your life that you have to pick on a 12yo dying girl to feel some level of achievement? wtf!
11/25/09
11/25/09
11/25/09
11/25/09
11/25/09
11/25/09
#speakup
11/25/09
But it's still better to see the game in your hands by someone else than buying it with fake money...
11/25/09
11/25/09
This is old news by now. There are some recent consumer protection stuff going about making it that gift cards no long expire. Like TheJinManCan said, they won't.
Still, it's the act of locking money to a store that feels rather silly to me. Remember when your grandma used to put 20 bucks in that little envelope with the Christmas card? That 20 bucks could be used for anything that 20 bucks could be spent on. Meanwhile a gift card is locked to a specific store and interest. There's rarely any incentive that makes a gift card advantageous to the receiver, and they're not at all a thoughtful gift.
#speakup
11/25/09
11/25/09
#speakup
11/21/09
I thought it was actually driving a REAL desert bus from Tucson to the end of the country, with exploding fuselage of the refuel vehicle and all!
Turns out though it was just an actual playthrough of a video game. Which took me 4 clicks on the WebCam and a YouTube search of "Desert Bus" to figure out....
11/04/09
When Bethesda started selling horse armor in Oblivion, people freaked out too, but selling meaningful items in multiplayer games hasn't become prevalent, and it's not going to happen on WoW, either. There is an enormous difference between selling cosmetic perks and statistical upgrades, and while the former may not be pleasant or palatable as far as those unwilling to shell out the cash required are concerned, most players either don't care or are perfectly willing to drop five dollars here and another five there. For the purists this will still be unacceptable, but for the majority of the people who play the game, it's a non-issue, and I'm sure I'm not the only WoW player who has noticed that Blizzard *gasp* has been catering to the average player's whims for several years now. Yes, this is how companies make a profit, but this is also how said companies keep their customers happy. We are not dealing with economics on a macroscale, supply does not create its own demand within the microcosm of the game world; Blizzard is selling pets because they know that enough people will buy them to turn a profit, which is among other things one of the reasons that the company exists--to make a profit for its shareholders. If you are uncomfortable with that, don't play, better yet, play indie games that have absolutely none of the wicked taint of capitalism. #worldofwarcraft
11/04/09
Personally, I find this deeply alarming. I dislike it for the reasons that have been mentioned- price for the content, the tax deductibility BS, but there is a bigger reason for me. WoW is deeply addictive, I think this is pretty well documented. I'm not saying most people get addicted, I'm not, but a lot of people do. And this move clearly caters to the addicts.
The problem, then, is one of philosophy- how can anyone remain loyal to a company that instead of regretting the addictive nature of their game, decides to capitalize and profit off of it? This is the black side of capitalism. It's not the same extreme, but it's the same thought process as drug dealers and war profiteers. In my eyes, this move is nothing short of evil. I dropped my WoW subscription two weeks ago because I was getting tired of it. I'll be honest, with as much work as I've invested, and as much as I enjoy it, I will probably be back. But this certainly gives me pause- and any progress in this direction (further, more grand microtransactions) would cause me to quit the game, if only because of how much I despise it. #worldofwarcraft
11/04/09
Honestly I knew Blizzard had sold out their moral values when they decided to allow race changes/faction Changes.
I used to to think that Blizzard would never go so far as to have all of this "Pay for extras" garbage but let's be honest, how long is it before you have to pay $5 to access the newest raid dungeon or play in a new battleground? Things are going downhill fast for Blizzard/WoW and it seems like their stockholders are gaining too much ground in the company.
Mark my words it's only a matter of time before they implement more and more drastic things that you can pay real money for to do in the game rather than make the awesome free content they have in the past. #worldofwarcraft
11/04/09
Seriously, these allegations are ridiculously paranoid. For starters, any free items. dungeons, or any other general content Blizzard elects to put in the game is done purely out of their good will toward players. What you pay for when you purchase the game is the content that is there, and an unspoken promise that things that are broken or imbalanced will be fixed as the issues are discovered. You continue to pay for this support, as well as the right to use Blizzard's servers, as you pay the monthly fees.
Receiving free dungeons is not part of this detail. However, new raid content has been released for free by Blizzard in the past, as well as numerous other elements. This is another sort of unspoken agreement wherein Blizzard sets a certain precedent of behavior. With the sort of support WoW receives, it would be dangerous to act outside of that precedent and do all of these paranoid things that are being claimed, e.g. charging for raid content.
Honestly, the kind of slippery logic being used to prophesy the downfall of WoW is very much akin to diagnosing cancer from a sneezing fit. These charges are purely cosmetic, and the only impact they have on the game is that some people will want them and can't get them, and others will look at them at the great portent of Doomsday. Everyone else will play the game, and as long as the standards Blizzard has set for actual, playable content remain the same, that set of 'everyone else' will do just fine to ignore the hell out of the conspiracy theorists. #worldofwarcraft
11/04/09
I think most people feel this newly popularized trend of micro-transactions is smearing the lines of ethics in an burgeoning market that is relatively unregulated. I personally, drew less on the obvious logic that Blizzard is a business and first and foremost their responsibility is to their stockholders and not the consumer and had an emotional reaction. I think that's what is happening with many of the posters here. #worldofwarcraft
11/05/09
I will freely admit that you are obviously paying for any new content as you pay the subscription fee, but what is really relevant from a consumer standpoint is what you feel like you're paying for. Granted this is anecdotal, but most of the players I've met don't think about the fees going toward new content. They take for granted that they are paying 15 dollars a month to access Blizzard's servers, and that's where they leave it.
I think this sentiment is somewhat apparent in the above arguments, seeing as one expressed concern is that we might be charged for raid content. Well, we already are, but so long as no extra costs are applied, it appears as though all changes made are free within the package we purchased. It's more a question of psychology than anything.
That said, Blizzard has been successful for a long time, and I highly doubt that their business managers would make such a huge misstep as charging for things they're already doing. I don't really see this move as being any different from giving Grunties to people who paid to watch the Blizzcon feed. It's fun to have if you've got the money, but it's completely unnecessary otherwise. #worldofwarcraft
11/05/09
11/04/09
11/04/09
They also didn't just lose an entire country of subscribers. #worldofwarcraft
11/04/09
11/04/09
11/04/09
11/04/09
I mean for petes sake, no one is forcing you to buy it, it doesn't do anything useful at all. If people want to spend ten bucks just so they can have a little panda dude follow them round when they remember to bring him out so be it. If you don't want to spend ten bucks on it then you get the sense of smug self satisfaction that you didn't support Blizzards capitalistic ways. See, even if you don't buy it they're giving you something for free! #worldofwarcraft
11/04/09
You bought the game out of the box. You pay for the subscription. You buy the additional expansions... The players of WoW have, substantially, paid the company for their effort and then some. But it doesn't stop there.
Changing the NAME of your character... a process that costs virutally nothing to do... costs $10. Changing a faction, another process that costs Blizzard nothing to perform... costs $30. I count 5 seperate "pay absurd amounts to change a data variable in our database" in my blizzard account page. Does Blizzard NEED to throw out ridiculous charge fees for these things? No.
They don't care if they're blindsiding the computer illiterates of their customer base, so long as it results in some extra dough.
Blizzard is not a company that is in financial trouble. Rather then giving a little something extra to their fanbase for free to share in their wealth and community, they pull garbage like this because money is their biggest incentive. The Blizzard of the 90's wasn't looking at every possible way they could squeeze a buck and that was respectable. Now it's "how can I get some sucker to feel insecure about inaccessable content and trick them into paying $10 for virtually nothing".
As a Blizzard fan from Starcraft until WoW's first expansion, I think these strategies are dispicable.
11/05/09
I'm sorry, I didn't know capitalism stopped when your business is financially stable. Here I thought business was all about making as much money as possible.
Blizzard still provides me with decently stable servers to play on, a well maintained game and regular "free" content updates. I feel I get my moneys worth from that. If they want to charge for a bunch of inconsequential little things I don't really care.
Also it's not like they don't hand out freebies to their playerbase often enough. Just recently they handed out a minipet just for merging your BNet account. Also they're hardly trying to trick people into buying "inaccessable content" it's not like they're pretending this is some kind of new race you can play and when you buy it going "HA HA it's just a pet!". If you play WoW you know what these do, you know how little they mean. If they still want to buy it then that's their decision.
It's cosmetic, it's optional it's not going to change the damn game one bit. I don't see how they could trick anyone into thinking otherwise. People will buy it because they want it not because they feel they have to.
@Sabbatai:
Oh wow I didn't know that. I mean it's not like they add these sort of things to the game all the freaking time. I never knew they were slowly destroying their servers by adding content.
/Sarcasm #worldofwarcraft
11/04/09
at least TF2 hats are free, albeit rare.
WOW is a cancer anyway- i hear people talk about it and it just seems like a huge time sink that gets you no where. I play games, sure, but not to the point where i'm living a double life. i mean, seriously. if you like RPGs, go get a game that actually ENDS, so you can, you know, experience life. or at least another game. :) lol #worldofwarcraft
11/04/09
11/04/09