Do you happen to have a source for any of your figures regarding these markets? I have a hard time understanding how a small scheme like this will result in hundreds of millions in annual profit.
At the end of the day, each monthly player results in one monthly fee, whether they are paying for themselves, or buying a token which another player's paid for. Hundreds of millions in increased profits would require tens of millions of active accounts. I am I think at last count Wow had about 6 million active monthly accounts.
Aha, but you're using the assumption that there are an equal number of WoW tokens bought by players and sold by players.
Blizzard could sell 20 million WoW tokens each month to players for cash even if only 2 million tokens are bought by players for virtual currency. Blizzard needs only buy the remaining 18 million tokens on their own auction house in exchange for virtual currency (which, conveniently, they can create out of thin air).
The question here, then, is not about the number of active accounts, but: how much extra cash are players willing to put into the game in order to get gear / avoid grinding / gain a competitive edge, etc. The size of this market could be very different; Wikipedia links to [0] (2008), which on page 10 examines some possible lower ($200m) and upper ($1.4bn) bounds for the annual size of the market. Of course, not all of that is WoW, and not all of it would necessarily be captured by Blizzard, but that's where I'm pulling the "tens to hundreds of millions in additional annual revenue" from.
>Blizzard needs only buy the remaining 18 million tokens on their own auction house in exchange for virtual currency (which, conveniently, they can create out of thin air).
Hmm, you're right. I assumed it had to be a player to player transfer of the token.
I guess under said system they are walking the pay-to-win line, as you say. They've been slowly making the game more and more accessible to casual gamers. I'd bet these decisions are driven by the fact that the games user base is dwindling.
I assumed it would only be players buying them as well, and it would be interesting to know how many Blizzard actually buy. There's a huge difference in the price of tokens in different regions, and I wonder if that's partially due to manipulation by Blizzard to make tokens less valuable in regiouns like North America where people will pay more money for less gold.
But I think you're misjudging negative reaction people have to "pay to win." Maybe I'm not correctly reading the average player, but I don't think it's so much a matter of Blizzard having to keep up the appearance of fairness. The underground gold market has been around for so long and in so many games that people expect that money can buy in-game currency. There are other games which are designed to be fair like first-person shooters, but part of the draw of MMOs is that they are explicitly not fair. Coming in as a new player, you have to compete against people with significant gear advantages, and there's an aspect of this that's actually ego-boosting. If you can compete with people who have more resources, not necessarily win but at least operate close to their level, you can feel good about your skill, and when someone else has an advantage, you can excuse it because you know the system isn't fair. It's the same with games of chance, where you know that some of your failings are attributed to bad luck and not your own failings.
Where "pay to win" goes bad is when you feel like you need to fork over excessive amounts of money to compete at all and feel like the game is just trying to squeeze you for money. But the way WoW is designed, it's relatively easy to get to the gear level of other players, and what's really valuable is having people who you can work closely with. In the time it takes to develop those relationships, you will have more than enough put into the game to have the resources you need to compete. Although gold can be a nice boost and snag a few top-notch pieces of gear, it's mostly unnecessary, and the really expensive items are usually vanity items.
So the unfairness is actually only a small part of the game which serves to excuse personal failings, and the really valuable resources: friends, time, and skill, are things which can't be bought.
>Blizzard needs only buy the remaining 18 million tokens on their own auction house in exchange for virtual currency (which, conveniently, they can create out of thin air).
Interesting, so the final effect is as if players had just bought virtual currency with real world dollars but they 'launder the guilt' through this token scheme..?
But wouldn't players be able to see through only 1 degree of indirection and make the connection that they are buying virtual currency with real?
BTW, this is something which CCP (who have a similar system for EVE online) very explicitly do not do. They make sure that purchased tokens are either destroyed by players, converted into gametime, or the associated profits are donated to charity.
Price differences between regions mean you can make tens of millions of ISK profit in a few trips. I have variously used a shuttle, covert ops frigate and interceptor to ferry billions of ISK worth at a time, and I am one of the smallest players in the market.
To get caught you have to do something foolish like buy heaps of PLEX, then undock with the character that bought them in Jita, during a wardec, and not have an instant undock bookmark.
At the end of the day, each monthly player results in one monthly fee, whether they are paying for themselves, or buying a token which another player's paid for. Hundreds of millions in increased profits would require tens of millions of active accounts. I am I think at last count Wow had about 6 million active monthly accounts.