Buying 7.5 Years Of Game Time - WoW Tokens By The Numbers

Blizzard announced today that the WoW Tokens were going to go on sale tomorrow, April 7, 2015. These tokens can be used to give you 30 days of game time.

The real money cost for the Tokens will be $20. The initial starting price to buy the tokens from the auction house (and potentially purchased without resubscribing) will at initially be set by Blizzard at 30,000 gold.

While the price for tokens will start to fluctuate based on market activity (if there are too many tokens for sale the price will drop and if there are too few the price will rise) I thought it would be fun to play with some Token math.

In the game I have around 2.7 million gold. If I paid the initial price of 30K for tokens I could buy 90 of them or 7.5 years of game time.

7.5 years.

If you added up the real world money that players would spent buying 90 WoW Tokens it would equal $1,800.

$1,800!

While the design of the WoW Token system (you can never get money back, only game time) means that I can't simply "sell" my 2.7 million gold for $1,800, if I did spend 7.5 years playing I would never spend a dime on the $1800 worth of WoW Tokens.

Even if we calculate my 2.7M to be worth 90 months of $15/month subscription fees that is still $1,350.

The $450 value difference is irrelevant because each party in a WoW Token transaction is looking to get something different out of the transaction.

The person who purchased the token for $20 wanted to get 30,000 gold for their $20.

The person who bought the token for 30,000 gold wanted 30 days of game time.

Just to reiterate, the person who buys the token for $20 doesn't care that it is $5 more for 30 days of game time because they aren't going to use it for game time but to buy 30,000 of gold.

The person who buys the token for 30,000 doesn't care that the other person paid $20 for 30 days of game time that could cost $15 otherwise because they are gaining the ability to pay for their game time with in-game gold.

All in all this is a very interesting system and I'm very interested to see how the system is received and used by the players.

I don't currently have an active World of Warcraft subscription. I did log on the other day on my old account in "Starter Edition" mode and spent a few minutes playing one of my sub-level 20 characters.

(The fact that all lapsed subs are put into "Starter Edition" mode was a pleasant surprise.)

The possibility that I may be able to pay for a WoW Token at some point without even having an active subscription is very tempting.

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