Posts with tag market

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The glyph market has spawned quite a few of the important modern auction house addons. It's a uniquely challenging market, as there are hundreds of different products, each with their own balance of suppliers, buyers, and materials. The challenges faced by early glyph producers were met by a hodgepodge of fairly complex addons and macros, and only recently have unified solutions began to appear. I remember that at one point, I had addons to:

• Keep track of how many glyphs I had on the AH, in various characters' banks and in their inventories.
• Allow me to queue a list of glyphs and build a materials list (that allowed me to buy the vendor mats with one click).
• Automatically queue enough glyphs in the second addon to assure that I kept stock levels at my desired level.
• Automatically post every glyph I made onto the AH.

The tasks needed for this market are not unique, and so the most important tool that can trace its origin to the glyph market is certainly TradeSkillMaster. TSM is an addon that I've covered before, and it's built from the ground up to be perfect for glyphs. It's also perfect for a lot of other markets, but mostly those you can treat like glyphs.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Tailoring is a profession often accused of being a profitless pursuit. While any profession can be unprofitable if you try hard enough, let's talk about some of the things you can do with tailoring. I'm going to start with the market that's newest for this expansion: PvP gear.

Insider Trader is a column about professions by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped about how to make money using the auction house. Email Basil your questions.

Blacksmithing is a very profitable profession at level 85 if you have the time to manage it. There are a few different markets that you have to choose from, so as soon as you have access to the Twilight Highlands metal trader, you will be able to start buying the patterns you'll need.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Cold's post on Cataclysm profitable commodities.

In a thread in the comments on my last article in which I had advised a reader to undercut his glyph competition heavily instead of camping the auction house, I got another comment that got me thinking about pricing. It basically stated that every time the commenter undercut heavily on glyphs, he would immediately get re-undercut by a few copper unless his price was down to the point of no profit.

I've written a little about the topic of pricing and undercutting before, but I felt it was time for a refresher. I'm going to start off by quoting what I wrote last March: "If everyone is knocking a copper off the next highest auction, they only way to undercut successfully is to try camp the AH and make sure you're always the competitor who has visited most recently. Needless to say, this is a colossal waste of your time." This is as true now as it was then.

If America's bankers want to get back into Moneytown, apparently they could do a lot worse than designing a hit MMO -- a study by a group named Screen Digest says that the MMO market is hotter than ever. After dropping down to a total of $701 million in 2008, games like World of Warcraft are seeing their revenues rise again, up to a total of $1.4 billion. And not surprisingly, WoW is still leading the charge -- while their overall market share is dropping very slightly, from 60% of the market down to around 58%, they're still making more money than ever. And while other games are picking up some numbers, according to Screen Digest, they're not really stealing players from Azeroth -- they're actually pulling new MMO players in.

Which is understandable -- during times of economic downturn, online games like MMOs are actually positioned to do very well. Why spend $15 on one night at the movies when you can spend it on a whole month of entertainment? World of Warcraft may have brought the MMO monster to the surface, but according to numbers like these, this is a game genre that's going to be extremely popular (and profitable) for a long time to come.

DFC Intelligence announced a "comprehensive study" in which they took a look at the top money making MMOs. And who sits at the top? Why our very own World of Warcraft, of course.

According to the report, which was brought to our attention by Shawn Schuster of our sister site Massively, WoW earned over $500 million in 2008. We know that there's a substantial divide between WoW and the rest of the MMO market, and to drive the point home: WoW is the only game in the $500 million+ category.

DFC Intelligence will be releasing a more detailed analysis of the top MMOs on February 16th. Be sure to keep an eye out on Massively for coverage of the other games on the list, and we'll bring you the WoW information when it comes up.

If you're like me, you're ... well, you're probably incredibly handsome and charming. But you're also probably interested in WoW's economy, given that it's the biggest and most involved metagame in WoW and a fascinating microcosm of a free-market economy.

I personally think that the how and why of WoW's economy is worth a deep look, and it appears there are a lot of people who agree with me--even some academics. It might even be worth just as much as any other book-learnin'.

At least, that's the basis of David Friedman's World of Warcraft economics course proposal. Friedman is an academic economist from San Jose, CA who's assembled this article as a think-tank for what a WoW economics course would entail if you had to fill it with a semester's worth of content. There's a lot of neat stuff in here, talking about relative prices of ore based on character level and rarity of ore and supply/demand, but he also asks for your input as to possible course material, which I'm sure you could gladly provide in the comments section of his page.

Good idea with sound academic basis, or another in the long list of high falootin' academia's attempts to justify playing WoW on the government's dime? WE REPORT. YOU DECIDE.

What do you get when you mix up a whole bunch of useless green gems? On the Public Test Realm you get Brilliant Glass. The most recent patch 2.4 notes state "A new jewelcrafting recipe has been added to transform many green quality gems into a single random blue quality gem. This recipe is available from grandmaster jewelcrafting trainers." Good news for those of us with stacks of semi-useless uncut green gems.

MMO champion posted more information. Brilliant Glass is created using three Azure Moonstones, three Blood Garnets, three Deep Peridots, three Flame Spessarite, three Golden Draenite, and three Shadow Draenite. The product, Brilliant Glass, can then be opened for the promised superior-quality gem. Bratac of Antonidas stated in the official forum that he created brilliant glass nine times and was rewarded with four Nightseyes, two Stars of Elune, two Dawnstones, and one Noble Topaz.

Wandering Goblin has a cool piece up entitled "25 Things You Didn't Know About WoW." Now, it's not really titled correctly, because many Blizzard fans will at least know a few of the things, and the truth is that they're not all about WoW anyway. But it is interesting reading, especially if you aren't super familiar with the background behind the Blue.

Fr'instance, when WoW released, Mike Morhaime says that every available employee was working on it. And production on Burning Crusade started about six months after that, when Blizzard determined that WoW was "stable." Other interesting tidbits (specifically from the recent WWI) include the fact that China is WoW's biggest market (people there pay by the hour, not by the month), and that Blizzard expects WoW to last them at least 10 years. So we may still be grinding murlocs in 2014.

It's also interesting that Blizzard says they don't plan budget limits for games-- either they're going to make a good game, or they don't bother making the game at all. Most companies probably wouldn't have ditched Starcraft: Ghost so late in the process, but Blizzard seems totally and completely committed to releasing a great game or not releasing a game at all. Interesting tactic, but then again it's worked for them so far.

[ via WorldofWar.net ]

With over six million gamers playing World of Warcraft, you wouldn't think there would be too awful many gamers left over to play anything else....and the gaming industry apparently thinks so, too.

As reported over on Gamespot today, at a recent breakfast event for investors, game developer THQ's president & CEO Brian Farrell was asked why none of the major publishers are trying to crack the stranglehold Blizzard has on the online gaming market. Farrell's response was, basically, that there simply may not be enough room on the block for another contender. In his words:

"I think what you will not [Farrell's emphasis] see THQ do is come out with another fantasy-type game. The other thing we're thinking is these things tend to have a window. Right now that product is World of Warcraft, so the idea would be to time something for when that product is going to be on its downward slope. To come out with something competitive now I think would be misguided for anyone, including THQ."

So, basically, the big strategy now is for the other game companies to just take their ball & go home? Wait until Blizzard is laying bloody on the battlefield? I can see what they're thinking from a numbers standpoint, but have a little faith in your own industry, people. There are untold scores of great online game ideas, just ripe for the developing (do I even have to mention my lifelong dream of a western MMO again?). Fantasy has been done; stop looking to the past & sideways at the competition and innovate, dammit! The next big MMO idea is out there somewhere....

And you thought Blizzard had population problems? According to this report at Playfuls.com, citing reports from Instat, China, already one of the largest bastions of online gaming in the world, will see more than 60 million of its citizens hop on board the MMO train by 2010, with a market value estimated at 2.1 billion dollars. That's a lot of microwave burritos & Mountain Dew...

Then again, they probably won't have the same problems that Blizzard has with their customer base; those communists tend to keep things running pretty smoothly....as long as you don't petition a GM; that could be considered treason.