It’s not just $30 for the SSD, it’s $30 for the SSD plus $40 for Shadowlands base edition plus whatever it would cost to have it installed (I know what to do with an internal drive, but it’s not a requirement for WoW players to have IT experience). And then you look at whether it’s better to pay $70+ for this or check out the latest F2P wonder, and then you look at your other expenses for the month, and you decide what you can afford and what to cut.
I realize some people are financially well-off and don’t have to sweat over what to them is a trivial amount of money… I wish I was there too, but in reality I’m not, and I do have to make choices about how to spend the money I have. Could I afford it? Yeah, probably, if I absolutely had to. Is it the best use of my resources at the moment? That’s a harder decision, and I suspect I’m not the only WoW player who’s needed to make some spending decisions recently (even if they won’t admit it).
We live in interesting times, WoW is definitely not the most important thing in the world right now, and I don’t really think it’s in Blizzard’s best interest to make people choose… which is likely why they revised the minimum specs to clarify that the game will run on a hard drive too.
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It’s actually quick if you don’t use addons 
I don’t know where people get these ideas that ssds aren’t budget either, almost every new prebuilt comes with one
WoW is not a 16 year old game.
IMO, every expansion should be treated as another game in the franchise because graphics, systems, system requirements, etc., all change each time.
WoW is a 2 year old game at this point.
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Old knowledge of when SSDs first came out and were $600/GB lol
I mentioned in another thread the min requirements weren’t correct. It made no sense to alienate the majority of the playerbase.
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In 2008 I purchased my first SSD, it was a 120gb sony, it cost me 140 bucks with tax, man that was crazy.
They’ve got a sale on kingston 240gb ssds for 28 bucks right now, that’s an 80% decrease in price from 2x the storage
Ain’t going to be the majority for long, SSDs are poised to outsell HDDs next year, HDDs are the new dot matrix printer or AGP video card
Does make me wonder if it was this bad when they moved to requiring PCIe videocards and stopped supporting AGP cards?
Or now that they don’t even list integrated graphics in the minimum, people flipped their lid on that.
TBH, Blizzard expects you to future-proof your computer a bit. You shouldn’t have to be upgrading every couple of years.
I mean that’s cool and all but it’s still a lot of money to some people.
If 28 bucks is a big deal, maybe you should think twice about playing a game that costs 15 bucks every month though, it’s a hard truth, but its a truth.
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People need to actually upgrade or purchase a new PC for that to happen. That probably isn’t happening for most players considering the concerns shown in these threads.
You don’t need to upgrade your pc to get an ssd though, anyone with more than 10 brain cells can put a new drive in their pc, it ain’t rocket dentistry.
I don’t know if I’d say all that, how much is an 8TB HDD vs SSD?
Maybe they budgeted to account for wow, gotta have some joy in life. Maybe it’s either WoW or nothing 
Maybe they live in a small town and there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do.
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Who needs an 8tb hdd? not your avg user
Sure, some people still use dot matrix printers and floppy disks, eventually though the majority will not use HDDs
You understand why they won’t do that right? Here is a hint, it isn’t the whiners that are holding back them from doing what you’re proposing.
So do I just buy this thing, plug it in, and move wow over to it?
Steam gamers who have 42,634 free games lol
Yo, have you seen how much space Ark takes up?
true, but do you really need to download those all at once 
Ark is like 140 gigs with a decent amount of mods, it’s stupid lol.