Starting tomorrow, you technically won’t need real money to keep playing World of Warcraft.
Blizzard will release the WoW Token after weekly maintenance concludes around 10 a.m. Pacific tomorrow. The in-game item gives a player 30 days of access to the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game. You can buy one with $20 of real money and then sell it on the auction house for a starting price of 30,000 gold. After that, the price will fluctuate based on the game’s economics.
Interestingly, a subscription for World of Warcraft costs $15 a month, so you’d be wasting money if you bought the tokens instead. Of course, the real point of buying one is to try to sell it for in-game gold.
Thirty-thousand gold is a pretty decent chunk of virtual change. It’s an amount only players with max-level characters could earn, usually through selling crafted items or bind-on-equip pieces of equipment from dungeons in the auction house. So, unless you play a lot of World of Warcraft, you probably won’t be able to give up your subscription.
World of Warcraft is one of the few MMOs to still has a subscription service. It’s able to do so because of its immense popularity and subscriber base of 10 million players. Still, the WoW Token will give hardcore players a chance to trade in-game work and money for play time.