On my original account for the first three years I played hardcore everyday. I spent probably somewhere in the vicinity of $1200 over that time. Then in small spurts until 2019. Then I quit. Now I’m back.
I just go by sub cost/month, but it’s an interesting question. As long as something in the game amuses you enough to play pretty regularly I think the cost is worth it. UNLESS you are really struggling for $…
So I just did the math on this covering the account I used from August 2005 when I first joined through April 2011 and the new account I created that I’ve used from September 2012 through now.
- $1,208.17 spent on Cosmetics and Services
- $639.27 spent on the game and nine subsequent expansions (edit: I have not purchased The War Within)
- $2,824.06 spent on subscriptions
That’s a grand total of $4,671.50 of my money spent since I started playing World of Warcraft.
As it stands, my sub is paid until February 2025, so when that happens my account(s) will be 233 months old. My account was active for 194 of those months.
This brings the monthly cost to me for my World of Warcraft habit to $24.07.
Given the years’ worth of /played time I’ve logged and (most importantly) the lifelong friendships this game brought me that would not otherwise have been made, it’s not even close. That’s money well spent.
Probably need to make at least $200 per hour to retire at 40.
Let’s use minimum wage in Australia as a benchmark of $23.33 an hour… If I average 2.5 hours a day on weekdays, and 8.5 hours each weekend, that’s 16 hours a week for $373.28, plus the subscription each month resulting in:
$1,493.11 each month…
It takes me 19 minutes to earn the cost of the monthly fee. Which comes out to 36 seconds of labor, a day, to play WoW.
If you want to include the cost of a PC and the Expansion over the course of 2 years, it costs 2 minutes and 56 seconds of labor a day to play WoW.
I spend that time making my coffee when I first get into the office.