First, they’re not “greedy”. They’re selling a product. At the end of the day, they need the money to pay for the roofs over their heads and put food on their tables. As consumers, we can’t just applaud and say “woot!! Great game!!” because they can’t look at their landlords and cover their apartments by applauding and saying “woot! Great apartment!!”
Second, they didn’t have to offer any early access and they still would have sold $90 editions of the game. Would they have sold as many? No way for especially us to know.
I’ll go further and say they don’t have to offer any lower priced editions. They could have made the only one available $90 and you buy it or you don’t play at all. Some people would have called that too steep, but others would have just bought it and gone on with life. It’s possible they could have sold enough $90 editions like that to have made up for not offering a lower price point one. (Regardless of that would have been a dumb move in the long run since an MMO, unlike other products, relies on some number of people all using the product at once and – to an extent – the more the merrier.)
So as far as the adding game time goes, I see nothing “awful” about it. It’s an extra service they’re willing to offer for a fee, just like a restaurant charging more for the 6oz wine over the 4oz pour.
I’m not sure why it qualifies as “unnecessary” either. Maybe they do need the money. Neither of us know the cash situation of the company in detail. I work for a veterinarian and I love to hear how “unnecessary” our prices on some things are when I know in painful detail how long and how much we pay to purchase the things, appropriately store the things, not only possess but also keep serviced the items which allow us to administer the things, and then we still need to pay to have a building and lights on in that building and staff who need to be paid to work in that building or we have no clinic for them to come to… but people will constantly complain about our “unnecessary” prices. So TL;DR… making assumptions can be frightfully inaccurate.
Also as far as “unnecessary” goes, it might turn out to be a better game experience for all to not have the whole of the WoW population at the starting gate all at once. If you were playing for any of the expansions which had split starting zones, as well as having experienced the ones which put all the players in the same spot at the same time, you know how splitting the players up positively effected the launch day game experience for everyone. This is one method of doing that without having to write in split zones. (Personally, I liked how Legion and BfA did it, but that is likely more expensive due to the increased level of planning/writing.)
Seriously. I’ve played from the start, for every expansion, been there on day one for EVERY launch. The non-split launch days with all players starting at the same time in the same place were always messy. The split ones were always cleaner.
So then instead of just saying “OMG IT’S SO UNFAIR!!!” and “OMG THEY’RE GREEDY!!” explain in quantitative ways exactly how it negatively effects your game experience. Constructive feedback like that might be something they find useful and can give them things to consider about this model and how it is effecting the player base as a whole.
One thing is certain: Emotional foot stomping absolutely does not help and this thread is full of lots of emotional foot stomping with little actual constructive feedback.
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