What were the chances Blizzard would find a way to monetise arguably the most exciting feature coming to World of Warcraft in years? High, it turns out. Blizzard will introduce a premium currency to the game, specifically for housing, called Hearthsteel.
Blizzard announced the Hearthsteel currency in a blog on Friday evening, explaining that you will be able to use it to buy items and furniture when the housing system arrives in December. Almost immediately, the post clarified that, “The VAST majority of Housing items are (and will continue to be) earnable in-game.”
Think of it similar to how mounts are currently handled: there’ll be a few available to buy with real money, but most of them will only be earnable in the game. And those race- and class-based housing options the game will have, such as undead-themed buildings for undead characters: they won’t be available to buy.
But as much as the blog did to pre-empt and address topics for backlash, backlash did inevitably follow. As of the time of writing, the official blog has more than 500 comments and the official forum post has more than 2500.
“Absolutely not,” wrote Uddermassage in the game’s forum. “You need to go back to the drawing board. This microtransaction crap can go jump in a lake.” Rambush, meanwhile (I like these names), said, “I can’t believe someone seriously typed this up and thought to themselves, ‘Yeah, that’s reasonable, they’ll go for that!'”
The concern is understandable. This is the first actual premium currency World of Warcraft has had. You can already buy gold, and you can directly buy items such as mounts, but there’s not a separate currency for this. The only separate currency the game has is Trader’s Tender, for the Trading Post, which is entirely earned and used for a kind of battle pass-like system. This, then, is a notable change.
Furthermore, there are deeper suspicions as to Blizzard’s intentions here – or rather, the intentions of Blizzard’s owner, Microsoft. Remember, Microsoft is reportedly pushing its gaming division to operate with a 30 percent profit margin, and there are few more reliable cash generators than the monthly subscription-fuelled World of Warcraft. Might Hearthsteel have been pushed through because of this? Perhaps the timing of the announcement is just bad.
Questions, questions; the answers will be provided when Blizzard unleashes housing in World of Warcraft in December. So far the feature looks fantastic, having spent years in development to develop ideas like neighbourhoods and groups of people living alongside each other. “It’s a kind of a sociological experiment,” Blizzard told us recently.
