In case anyone thought that virtual item sales weren't a big deal in the traditional MMO world, this morning Blizzard announced the online sale of a new "celestial steed" for use in WoW. These mounts cost $25 (on top of the retail price plus $15 monthly subscription). So in a world of free games and virtual items selling for a dollar or two, how popular could a $25 sparkly flying pony be?
Well, the queue for their purchase was at least up to over 91,000 people waiting in the queue earlier today. When I took a screen shot, it had fallen to "only" about 85,000.
90,000 X $25 = $2,250,000.
In one day. From one item. In a game that isn't free to play anyway.
Something tells me we really, really haven't mapped the extent of the market for fast, frictionless sales of online goods -- "objects" that have a low cost of creation and essentially no cost of duplication. Even 90,000+ times.
Update: as of 22:50 Eastern Time US tonight, the queue was still over 90,000. Approximately 21% of the available steeds had been sold.
(Crossposted from my Online Alchemy blog.)
(Update from greglas: Sorry, comments are closed on this until we figure out how to go past 100 comments per post.)
I can't seem to view any more comments after Mike's from May 7th. Any trick on how to view them? (Edit post to give instructions, please!)
Posted by: Isaac Knowles | May 08, 2010 at 10:49