This.
The esports thing was super sketchy. Asking us to find their contest? Just smells bad.
This is normal.
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Yea, I’m gonna stop responding, cause I don’t think you understand how taxing and donating works. >_>
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Here we go again with ignorant people not understanding how ALL charity works here…
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You get a tax write off when you donate to charity. all of the money will at first go to Blizzard they will then give up to 3 million to the charity and get a tax write off for it seriously rich people and companies do it all the time.
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From my knowledge of things, the IRS caps how much can be donated to charities for tax write-off. This may be why they capped it.
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I wonder how close to that $3million mark Blizzard would get if they just opened up donations with 100% up to 3 million going to charity as opposed to offering a pet.
It doesn’t automatically mean they’re being greedy. They just know people usually won’t give anything without getting something in return, (like people enjoy berating corporations over for their tax write offs) so they made a pet for people to buy so they can feel like humanitarians for “donating” their 10 smackeroos.
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Beep boop hang on here’s the Business Bus
Naturally, making a new pet (Which Dotty is, to my knowledge the entire model was made from scratch) takes time, money, and various other resources
Naturally a return in investment at some point would be nice for a business, hence why there is a cap on how much goes to the two charities (Beyond the tax writeoff, and getting into video game companies and taxes in general is a whole 'nother beast)
This isn’t exactly a new practice, many charity incentives like this has a cap to how much they give, the obvious goal is to have enough of the pets sell to turn a profit and hey, they give some money to good causes at the same time
Not sure why people are shocked and/or outraged by this, multiple parties are benefiting from this incentive
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Exactly. And there’s a cap on how much they can write off for charity, according to the IRS, as far as I remember. The 3mil may be the corporate cap.
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Yes. That is exactly how it works. Not only that but Blizzard will continue selling it next year and pocket all the profit. That is what corporations do… They sell things to make money. They have never tried to hide this fact.
If you don’t want to worry about whether your money makes it to children or not, make a direct donation to the charities of your choice.
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That too. It’s always worked this way. I’m not sure why people are trying to suddenly find something to be outraged over. 
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This is really gross and weird, I don’t know why they are doing this. Not that long ago the OW team raised a record amount of money ($12.7 million) for a breast cancer charity without using shady tactics like this. So it’s not even a Blizzard thing, it’s specifically just the WoW team doing this for some reason. And for past charity WoW pets they didn’t do this, either.
Wtf WoW team?
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How is it shady? They specifically spell this out on the sales page. It is only shady if you don’t actually look at the text on the page and are uninformed.
You know what is shady? That the Overwatch team didn’t disclose that they can deduct the $12.7 million from Blizzard’s Federal Taxes.
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This.
Blizzard does not need to be a part of your charitable donations.
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The only info on the IRS site I can find is percentages and it looks like it’s written towards individuals.
Because they could just… not pocket the rest of the money for a pet specifically advertised as a “charity pet” like they’ve done for practically all other charity pets they’ve sold. And what other game teams have done when it comes to raising money for charities.
It’s really weird and shady that just the current WoW team specifically is doing this when this is not normally what they’ve done when it comes to selling charity pets or giving money to charities in general for the rest of Blizzard.
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What is that thing supposed to be? It looks absolutely hideous.
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Also this.
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They aren’t… It is the Blizzard management that decides these things. The development team just develops. The same people who decided in the past for Overwatch, decided this.
Without understanding tax laws, how things change each year and what corporations are allowed to do and how, we can’t make these statements and cry “shady.”
I was talking with one of my corporate lawyer friends a few months ago about how company donations are capped now and they were trying to figure out how best to donate to their favorite charities for the holidays for max write-off incentive. But I honestly don’t remember the details. I got bored and tuned him out. LOL
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That’s why it’s weird. If it’s the same people as before that made the decision regarding giving money to charities throughout Blizzard, why decide now to pocket the rest of the money when they’ve never done that before when they gave money to charity? Not for any other pet they’ve sold for charity, or any other charity money raising they did for other Blizzard games.
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