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posted by cmn32480 on Monday April 13 2015, @03:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the oooooooo-shiny! dept.

Ars Technica is reporting on Blizzard's decision to release tokens redeemable for game subscription time as in-game tokens, tradeable for Azeroth Gold in the Auction House. This has had the practical economic upshot of giving the in-game gold a legitimate real-world value for first time.

To start the market off, Blizzard set the price of a $20 token at 30,000 gold. That gold price increased incrementally for a few hours before plummeting precipitously starting yesterday evening in the US. As of this writing, just over 24 hours after the markets opened, that initial gold price of a token has fallen over 27 percent to 21,739 gold, according to an API-based tracking site.

This isn't that surprising when you look at the going rates for WoW gold from third-party sellers. According to wowgoldrates.com, $20 can get you anywhere from 10,000 to roughly 15,000 gold on the gray market, depending on which reseller you use (you can get slightly better rates if you buy in bulk).

The tokens are worth 30 days of game time, are currently only available on US servers and represent a hefty premium against regular account subscription rates. Their in-game price drop rebounded at 20,307g and rallied to 26,977g. At the time of submission, the $20 tokens were valued at 23,071g, making $1 worth 1,153.55g.

The grey market has responded with substantial rate changes since the quotations in the Ars article. One seller is now offering 24,000g for $20.43, their rates working out to between 1179.25 and 1263.80, depending on volume. So, while gold buyers, subscription dodgers and Blizzard are all celebrating, the gold sellers have seen their margins slashed and are investing heavily in aspirin.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Monday April 13 2015, @09:05AM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Monday April 13 2015, @09:05AM (#169598) Homepage Journal

    If anyone is interested, Cory Doctorow's novel "For The Win" covers the subject of MMO economics from an interesting angle. It's available under CC NC-SA 3.0 from here [craphound.com]. It's a young-adult title, the online downloadable version had a few annoying typos in it when I read it, but nothing that ruins it's readability. Official plain text, PDF and HTML available at the top of page, fan contributed versions of all kinds of formats (including epub and azw) available a little further down.

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