Posts with tag sales

If you're on the hunt for holiday presents for your fellow WoW-players, you might want to consider the World of Warcraft-themed Mega Bloks sets -- they're fun to put together and make excellent additions to the toy layout on your desk or bookshelf. (Everyone keeps toys scattered on their desks, don't they?) To help you along, Amazon is currently offering a lot of sets at a big discount, bringing some of the pricier sets within easy financial reach. Sets on sale right now include:

• Arthas & Sindragosa for $14.00 (60% off)
• Sha of Anger for $12.99 (68% off)
• Deathwing's Stormwind Assault for $45.00 (55% off)

...and plenty more. Many of these discounts are offered by third-party Amazon retailers, but most of the deals we looked at (and all the ones above) were shipped by Amazon, so we wouldn't expect you to have any trouble getting your hands on them. But like most of these Amazon sales we have no clue when prices might jump back up to retail -- so if you're interested in picking up some Mega Bloks for yourself or your friends, get shopping!

[Via Reddit]

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You've all seen the $4.99 World of Warcraft deal, but if you're looking to speed up your gaming PC or get your hands on some new peripherals, Cyber Monday is going to be one of your last big sale days before Christmas. Here's a quick roundup of some of the US-based deals out there.

Starting with the peripherals, Steelseries is running a Cyber Monday sale which includes some WoW mice and mouse pads at up to 40% off. They also come with a free set of touchscreen controls for your tablet and free shipping. You'll also find some headsets and other accessories on sale at Steelseries. Once you make the move to a mechanical keyboard, there's no going back. Newegg has one on sale for $49.99 after rebate. They also have a 27" IPS monitor half price at $199.99.

PC hardware deals

I believe that the single greatest upgrade you can make for your PC's overall performance is to get a SSD (solid state drive). Even a small sized one will be enough to hold your Windows installation, some applications, and a few games including WoW. Games will load quicker, and your entire PC experience is smoother and more responsive. Amazon.com has a large list of SSDs on sale, as does Newegg.com. A good rule of thumb for SSDs is that anything 60 cents per GB or below is a pretty good deal, but you will obviously pay quite a bit more for performance brands.

Tis the season for holiday sales! Though Blizzard's Winter Sale offers some great prices, right now Amazon is offering a slightly better bargain for dealhunters looking to pick up Mists of Pandaria for their holiday wishlist. The online megaretailer is offering Mists for $7.99 -- compared to Blizzard's current price of $9.99 -- and is matching Blizzard's $4.99 pricing for World of Warcraft proper, which includes all other expansions. These are boxed versions -- Blizzard's sales are for digital downloads -- so if you want a game box to wrap under the tree, this is an ideal option... but bear in mind that it means you will have to pay shipping costs, which could prevent this buy from being as much of a bargain as it appears.

Of course, Amazon's prices could change at any time, so if you were considering picking up Mists for the holidays, get it before these holiday prices are gone!

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Black Friday (November 29th), the traditional beginning of the holiday shopping season, is always packed with sales to lure us away from our computers and into shopping centers. This year's deals at GameStop are particularly tempting for WoW-players -- or those that want to become WoW players. On offer are the World of Warcraft Battle Chest (which includes expansions up to Cataclysm) for $5, Mists of Pandaria for $10, and a 60-day game time card for $5. The former offers are a great deal for anyone looking to get friends into WoW, but the latter is a great deal for any active player -- even if you don't usually use game time cards, the appeal of getting $30 worth of gameplay for $5 is definitely high.

Bear in mind, however, that this information is coming from a leaked Black Friday ad on the site BlackFriday.com and could still change -- so you may want to wait for an official announcement from GameStop before you start camping out in front of your local shop.

Editors note: Gamestop will not be selling $5 game time cards on Black Friday. For the correct information, please visit our updated post.

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The Blizzard Store is having a sale for this week only: The BattleChest (which includes vanilla WoW and The Burning Crusade), Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm are $10 each. These prices are for either the boxed games or the digital downloads. For those of you in the EU region, the European Blizzard Store has them each on sale for EUR 10,00.

Blizzard did something similar just before the release of Cataclysm. Severely reducing the barrier to entry for the coming expansion was obviously a success.

So if you are trying to get friends and/or family to join you in Mists of Pandaria (or want another account), now's the time to do it. The sale ends July 9.

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We all know that the best way to enjoy a tall, frosty beverage is from a chalice fashioned from the skulls of your vanquished foes. But what's the second best way? Why, a giant World of Warcraft stein from Taverncraft, of course!

If you've always coveted these wonderful utilitarian works of art, we have good news: This weekend only, Taverncraft is offering 15% off its entire stock of collectable World of Warcraft steins. If you've been putting off ordering that sweet murloc stein or the epic Tankard O' Terror, this may be the time to bite the bullet and get it done.

According to Taverncraft's Twitter page, all you need to do to take advantage of the deal is to enter the code 5H7G3T prior to checkout.

Or you could drink the blood of your enemies in, like, a vendor trash-quality sippy cup. If you think you can pull the look off.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

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Proving that Deathwing wrecking up the joint can actually be a good thing, this recent press release from Blizzard shows us that after an initial burst of 3.3 million, Cataclysm went on to sell another 1.4 million copies over the next month.

Blizzard Entertainment Press Releases

"We created thousands of new quests, introduced new lands to explore, and extensively revamped the game world for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, making it our biggest and most ambitious expansion yet," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We've been floored by the community's response so far, and we'd like to thank them for their continued passion and support for World of Warcraft, and for helping Cataclysm reach this incredible milestone."

source

This pretty much cements Cataclysm's position as a huge seller for Blizzard and brings this expansion up above Wrath of the Lich King, the previous best seller. It's unlikely that anyone is exactly surprised by this news, but it bodes well for the game and its current success.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

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I hear this all the time: "Hurrr! Undercutters are ruining this market! Durrr!". Today, we're going to talk about this. Undercutting doesn't ruin markets, high supply does. Also, if it's still profitable, the market's not ruined, it's just being taken away from you. Cut your margins and undercut back. Or buy them out if you still think they're wrong and you're right.

But markets should be protected from undercutters!

Balderdash. Markets are a place where people can sell their goods for any price they want. You're describing collusion between sellers to reduce "lost profits," where every time someone wants to undercut with a new auction, they do so by the smallest possible amount.

More often than not, all your competitors will have the same cost that you do, and as soon as they see you commit to an auction, they'll undercut you right back. 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, and you would probably make more money per hour doing argent tourney dailies.

The only way to effectively sell your product in a market with a lot of competitors is to undercut by more than just a trivial amount. You need to make it just cheap enough that your competition is less likely to undercut you, but expensive enough that you're still making money.

Wryxian has written a book on fishing over on the forums -- he originally responded to the thread with a quick link that affirmed in patch 3.3, you will never ever catch trash from fishing pools, regardless of your fishing level. If you put the bobber in a pool, you'll get what you're supposed to, no matter what (presumably to allow even low level players to do the fishing quests). But players have problems with that. First, there's the old issue of things always getting easier as the game changes -- people are complaining that they had to level with missed catches and trash, and those who level fishing after 3.3 won't. For that, I don't have a better answer than Wryxian does: that's just the way it works. The game is ever-changing, and most changes make things easier. That shouldn't devalue what you did before.

The other issue is that this may destroy the fishing economy -- if even low level characters always get the fish they want 100% of the time, that means more fish in the market, which means any money high-level fishermen would have made off of rare fish will probably go bye-bye. But Wryxian says that's OK -- people will still use fish for themselves, and he believes that the pain of losing that AH sale will be solved by the bonus of always getting the fish you want. We'll have to see -- it's true that between the updates to cooking lately (and the future fishy updates we're expecting), Blizzard is making sure the secondary professions are much less exclusive, which means there has to be the balance of also making them less lucrative.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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Yes indeed, this Friday is none other than Black Friday, which means the deals will be aplenty, the crowds will be horrendous, and the holiday money drain will begin (of course, you could go with Buy Nothing Day, but that seems a little too grinchy to me -- why not go ahead and buy while the buying's good?). Fortunately, there are a few WoW deals floating around out there, in case you need to pick up a copy of the game for a loved one (or that Recruit-a-friend account you've been planning to make).

The regular WoW vanilla game (useful for leveling to 60, but if you want to go past that, you'll have to buy the expansions) is on sale in a few places for super cheap -- the Ladies of Leet saw it at Best Buy for just five bucks, and Gamestop's matching that price. Gamestop also will have the Battle Chest (with WoW and BC and a few other goodies) for $19.99, and Newegg has the same price if you don't want to fight the crowds. Unfortunately, there's no sign of Wrath on sale -- you'll still have to pony up the $40 if that's the one you want. But stay tuned in the comments -- if readers can find better prices on this stuff, we're sure you'll see them below. Good luck out there, happy deal finding.

Researchers are apparently using economies in virtual worlds like Everquest, EVE Online, and of course our own World of Warcraft to determine how real-world economies work, according to this article by Reuters. Scientists have, of course, used WoW to model real-world behavior before, but that was specifically for something biological, and thus there were quite a few differences between the virtual model and the real application. In economies, however, it's all just money and numbers, so researchers can easily see real patterns and movements in the data.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't go too deeply into their results (and it only talks about their findings from Everquest), but there is one nugget of conclusion: the economists saw inflation spike in one server over 50% in just five months. They say that the population rose on the server, which apparently made some items hard to find, thus raising prices. Economists say they've seen that same thing in the real world before: in developing nations, and in war zones. We can probably see similar effects right around a patch, or even just on weekends. As more people run to the AH to buy certain items, inscriptions or enchants, the price on those is going to rise. Interesting stuff -- it would be cool to hear what other similarities these guys have found between the virtual world and the real.

Gamasutra has received an interesting stat from the good folks at NPD: after hearing that The Sims 3 sold over 800,000 copies in its first month, they were curious to see what kind of unit sales our own World of Warcraft has experienced. And the numbers are pretty big: among the original game and all of the expansion packs since the vanilla release over four years ago, NPD says 8.6 million boxes of WoW have been sold in the US. That's a little misleading if you're comparing it to actual subscription numbers: remember that this is over three different releases (so the actual number of all-time players, not current players, is probably 1/3 of that), and it includes different collectors' editions of each of the three game editions. So there are nowhere near 8.6 million US players of WoW -- that's just how many times players have come through the retail line with the various releases.

What that is, however, is a lot of money. Gamasutra estimates that at an average of $30 for each unit sold (the vanilla game currently retails at $20, but the expansions all sell at $40, and of course the original game was more expensive once upon a time), that's $258 million in income for Blizzard. In short, Blizzard's making a mint at the retail counter, even before they sign anyone up for subscriptions.

Then again, if you look at their own costs, those aren't insubstantial, either -- Activision's Bobby Kotick claimed that anyone starting up an MMO to compete with WoW would have to throw at least half a billion dollars into the mix just to get started, so we can presume Blizzard has spent at least $500 million on their staff, development, and hardware. So it's not like they're taking it all to the bank, though we can at least presume they're sitting firmly in the black.

We've posted about a few BlizzCon ticket giveaways before, but Kingston, the computer memory maker, is holding the biggest so far: they're giving away a total of ten tickets to Blizzard's big event in Anaheim next month. This one's cake, too: just enter in your info on their page about you and the kind of computer memory you use and buy, and then they'll pick ten random winners to get hooked up with a ticket to BlizzCon. Unfortunately, you're on your own for transportation to and from the event (and, we presume, a hotel to stay in if you're transporting from out of town). But there's never been a better time to call up your cousin Ed who moved out to Irvine to be a game developer a few years ago and still has that old sleeper couch to stay on. Right?

Good luck to everyone who enters -- hopefully if you weren't able to grab tickets in the chaos that ensued during the original sales, you've been able to either buy, trade, or win for one since then. And if you do make it out there, don't forget: Thursday night we'll be rocking out at the Anabella. Come by and say hi!

Our economy may still be pretty much in the gutter, but one industry is still going strong. If you glanced at what site you were reading this on and guessed "online gaming," congrats! You win a gold star. Here you go: ★.

Anyway, according to this industry report featured on GameSpot, online gaming overall (including MMOs, in turn including WoW) was up 22% year-over-year in May 2009. 87.1 million people were estimated to game online in the USA, an impressive 28% of our estimated total population.

Of course, a huge chunk of this is browser-based games (think Bejeweled or Yahoo! Games). WoW is apparently the 21st most popular "online locale," clocking in at 2.2 million US visitors. Still, I'd say 21st isn't bad for a game with a subscription fee; 2.2 million players at $15 a month is $33 million a month (assuming the each have exactly one account). The next-closest MMO, according to this report, is RuneScape, at 202,000 players. Really? Aren't there other MMOs with more than that?

Anyway, online gaming, like online everything else, is on the rise. Single-player, localized games are starting to feel positively quaint, although I still think Chrono Trigger is the best computer RPG of all time.