Last October, World of Warcraft elected to celebrate its 20th anniversary by selling a $90 mount with mail and auction house features baked in. And even though complaints about the eye-watering price and pay-to-win features of the mount were raised, it would appear that those voices were drowned out by the sound of ringing cash registers – to the tune of millions of dollars.
According to a heavily caveated estimate put together by Wowhead, Blizzard appears to have made as much as $16M off of sales for the Trader’s Gilded Brutosaur mount. The site drew in publicly available data from Data for Azeroth and Raider.io, gathering the percentage of accounts that own the Brutosaur mount and the exact number of characters that earned specific achievements, then cross-referenced that data to get a total number of accounts that potentially spent the $90 (or equivalent in WoW Tokens).
Indeed, Wowhead does point out that there are some inefficiencies with its data methodology, including the estimate not accounting for players who spent WoW Tokens to get the mount or those who earned the mount via promotions like Twitch Drops. Even so, it concludes that players have signaled an appetite for these pricey mounts.
“Ever since the Activision Blizzard acquisition, we’ve seen a larger monetization push with WoW,” the site writes. “[This] will likely continue beyond the 20th Anniversary, with more expensive cosmetics being only another axis in Microsoft’s monetization plans.”
