Posts tagged videos

Blizzard yesterday released two virtual items for World of Warcraft in their online store – a vanity pet called Lil’ XT which, we are informed an expert in the field (a girl), is “cute”, and the first functional item to be sold in the store, the Celestial Mount.

This in-game mount, which is made of stars is assumed to be the item that has backed up Blizzard’s download servers. Reports from WoW.com bring the number of queued customers as high as 80,000, with some claims as high as 140,000. These queues are, however, for all of Blizzard’s downloadable products, including the previous four vanity pets, and the games themselves. Of course, that doesn’t diminish the fact that, minimum, there was almost a million bucks-worth of customers queued for many hours at a time.

The Celestial Steed is capable of matching the speed of your riding skill (meaning as soon as you get training, your steed will be able to fly), and is account-wide, so players with multiple characters will get the steed too, as will newly created characters on the same account. This means that for $25 (the cost of the mount on Blizzard’s store), a player will save thousands upon thousands of in-game gold on the purchase of mounts across all characters. Also, it looks damn spiffy. Taking into consideration the usefulness and spiffyness of the Celestial Steed, it’s probably a safe bet that this was the major moneymaker here, which means that Blizzard is likely raking in far more than one or two million over the course of a day. itwork.com estimates an income of approximately 2.5 million an hour. And there were complaints about the $15 Modern Warfare 2 map pack!

There is some concern amongst the community about functional items now being sold, as it is a slippery-slope to cash-for-gear, or even cash-for-gold, which most players agree would “blow (celestial) goats”. Hopefully Blizzard will exercise some discretion.

When reached for comment about just how well the steed was selling, a representative for Blizzard simply said “We don’t provide any sales figures for the Celestial Steed or Lil’ XT.”