Every January we have a couple of cold snaps. One occurred over the weekend and is still going on. Northerners like to poke fun at how we Texans freak out over a little freezing rain (and God only knows what would happen if it actually snowed down here). It’s true – it’s just so far out of our normal experience that we don’t know how to handle it.
Of course, Burning Crusade goes on sale at midnight tonight. Not having had the chance to preorder it, I’ll be heading down to my local Wal-Mart around 11 pm tonight, no matter how frozen the roads are. I’m hoping to get supremely lucky and snag at least one Collector’s Edition, but even if I don’t manage that, I’m really looking forward to finally making my Draenei Shaman. And then typing /flirt and /silly over and over again for an hour.
Oh, and sorry…nothing is going to get done on Planitia until my Burning Crusade curiosity is satisfied.
There’s one thing that I don’t quite ‘get’ in the burning crusade thing.
Facts:
– If you play WoW, you’re paying monthly. So the money traffic bit works, and runs all the time.
– If you play WoW, you get (weekly) patches automatically through some kind of p2p file transfer system, which also supports encryption (like steam’s pre-download things), so electronic data transfer bit works.
– If you’re serious about WoW by any degree, you want the expansion.
– By using digital transfer, game companies save money by skipping retail.
So, you have your hungry user base who would have their credit cards ready if you already didn’t have their credit cards, but you force them to purchase the expansion in a physical retail store?
If the media is so important, you could always mail it to them later on, letting them play *now*.
The only explanation I’ve come up so far is that they want to make retail happy, and doing so they’ll get tons of new advertisement for the game.
Still feels tad stupid to me.
It IS because they want to keep retail happy. Not every game developer believes in the bright shining online-only future yet. Besides, you get these great wodges of cash when Wal-Mart says they’ll take 500,000 copies rather than a much smaller trickle as each individual player decides to upgrade. Yes, the trickle may add up to more eventually, but there’s just something about being handed a multi-million dollar check that makes a lot of people say “yes”.
If you’re interested in playing on Suramar, that’s where I’ll be when I get the game (probably come in the mail on Mon or Tues).
I think I’m going to play a blue-guy paladin.
Burning Crusade feels like more of the same, but I’m enjoying it so far.