I cant speak for most casual players, but for this casual player, endgame is an afterthought. Maybe a heroic dungeon if i need to do it for a questline.
Not really concerned about being at top tier in anything right now, hence the casual part of the title.
Ya but it’d also be lower cost for quality. But we pay anyways bc we’re addicts.
What price increase?
Ouch, not the snippet I would want associated with me.
They’ll course correct with a bigger in-game shop.
$15 a month is expensive, even less if you do the 6 month sub? $39.99 for an entire expansion. SO EXPENSIVE LOL… Most new games cost $60 and last 20-40 hours. WoW lasts forever and is the cost of one movie ticket every month. Saying this game is expensive is pretty funny.
For the content you get, yes it is. People love to just mention subs and not the cost of the actual expansion. So far SL has cost most people aroud $85. You buy the expansion for the content, then you pay $15 to actually get access to that content. You then get to repeat that same content you just purchased on higher levels of difficulty for months on end.
Are you talking about the U.S. or about the exchange rate adjustments?
Exchange rate isn’t the only factor. Cost of doing business in the foreign country is another.
This seems like a stretch as the base price is $39.99 and people that paid for Heroic or Epic additions clearly felt that the extra cosmetics/mounts were worth the added cost. This whole discussion centers around people that can’t handle an added cost of $2-4/month and the most logical assumption is that those folks would have chosen the base game since they have limited entertainment budgets.
Elder-Scrolls Online started with a monthly fee–they couldn’t retain the critical mass of players they wanted and went F2P… to me that’s a death-knell (and I thought ESO’s graphics were FAR superior, but the game play felt lacking with the exception of the big PvP battles in the central zone).
I played a pure F2P called Perfect World International and it was just a Chinese-made grind-fest with actual gear-power for sale locked behind random loot boxes in their cash shop. Again better graphics but imagine hunters having to pay cash to gamble for a chance at the most powerful pets or warriors needed a particular sword for a +20% attack power boost that you gamble for with cash–I left with a sour taste in my mouth.
I played Jedi Fallen Order (clearly not an MMO), paid $60 and got about 45 hours of playtime–it was excellent and I would highly recommend it, but even at $80 for the Epic edition and $13/mo for 6-month subs, I easily get 1,000 hours of entertainment out of WoW in a year for about $240 if I get in 20 hours a week. That’s $4.65/week, so less than $10 for two weeks which is what I got out of Fallen Order for $60–seems like a bargain because even though Fallen Order is a single-player game, to me it’s about the entertainment value and no competing MMO has offered me near the entertainment WoW does; your mileage may vary of course.
It has to do with the currency exchanges, AUD,CAD,BRL to USD.
If that was the case then CAD should be at about $15 USD, but after exchange they’re paying $17.31 USD. AUD (and probably BRL) are in line with US after exchange, but Canada and New Zealand have the unfortunate distinction of paying more after exchange than most everyone else.
I thought this was explained by Blizz as to why it’s like this? Should be in the blue post announcements.
And the Canadian price is ONLY for game time. NOT subscriptions.
ESO went to consoles to increase the number of players and they seem to be doing okay. It’ll be interesting to see what Microsoft does with the game longer term.
after exchange rates everyone should be paying the same price on the NA servers, very unfair to the Canadians.
Brazil had 3 price increases during BFA alone and 2 during Legion.
When I started playing the price was 15 BRL, now 35 BRL.
Extra services also increase in price, in fact at the time some actually went up over 100%.
The price of the expansion itself has also increased.
I’d wager blizzard saw alot of Canadians likely paying out their monthly subs with blizz balance from gold or were doing some shuffle with US currency to avoid paying the appropriate amount that was expected if they were to buy a one month continuous sub.
The blue post explainers are always pretty vague. The CAD one says “From time to time, it’s necessary to make changes to certain pricing based on a variety of factors, including global and regional market conditions.”
It would be crystal clear if they had said something like “Canada is implementing a new digital goods service tax, in addition to existing GST, which is effective 1-Jun-2021 and will be included in your base game-time price, effective 16-Dec-2020, since it is to be collected by Blizzard Entertainment, which is a foreign business for Canadians, and thus does not appear as an itemized tax at checkout.”
That explanation is speculation, but a crystal clear statement like that would explain to a lot of unhappy Canadians their government is to blame (if that were the case) or if it’s just Blizzard being greedy because they now pay more after exchange unless they buy subs–nobody else is in that boat except NZ, so why CA and why now when the tax doesn’t hit 'til summer?
P.S. …and how is it game-time is affected by “regional market conditions,” but subs are not? WoW pricing is the same for subs/game-time in every other region, so why the sudden different for CA?
It wouldn’t make sense for them to be increasing the price now, if the tax was the reason. Although I suspect it IS the reason and they either missed that it wasn’t effective until next July or decided to start charging early to make canadians pay for the extra administration. I guess we shall see if we get another price increase in 5-6 months that is tax.
I don’t know why. I just know that’s the only thing that changed.
I think it was either due to shennanegans or a test case. In any case, when you charge different prices for the same product, it should affect how people will pay.
Also, small amounts involved but the tacit message that Blizzard is sending is don’t park real money cash in battlenet bucks.