Gaming —

World of Warcraft gold can now be used to buy other Blizzard items

In-game gold pieces are now worth a fraction of a penny across Battle.net.

Those huge heaps of <i>WoW</i> gold have got to be worth, like, $50 on Blizzard.net. Easily.
Enlarge / Those huge heaps of WoW gold have got to be worth, like, $50 on Blizzard.net. Easily.

It has been almost two years now since Blizzard began letting World of Warcraft players pay for their monthly game-time subscriptions using in-game gold rather than real money. Now, Blizzard is expanding that effort by letting players indirectly trade WoW gold for in-game items in other Blizzard games like Hearthstone and Overwatch.

The new feature is really just a slight tweak to the WoW Token, a specialized item that can be purchased for $20 (£15/€20) in real money or for a free-floating, in-game gold price at World of Warcraft auction houses. Those Tokens can still be exchanged for 30 days of World of Warcraft subscription time, but as of this week, they can also be redeemed for $15 in balance on your Battle.net account. (European figures TBC.)

That balance can then be spent on packs of Hearthstone cards, Overwatch Loot Boxes, Heroes of the Storm skins, or even downloadable copies of games like StarCraft II and Diablo III. That means that a dedicated WoW player can now fund a multigame Blizzard habit simply by earning enough in-game gold.

You'd better be prepared to farm a lot of gold, though. The purchase price for a WoW Token at the auction house can fluctuate wildly—as of this writing, the tokens have gone for anywhere from 59,833 gold to 108,924 gold in the last 24 hours, according to tracking site WowToken.info. That gives each in-game gold piece a rough value between 1/100th and 2/100th of a cent, when converted to Blizzard.net balance.

Even for min-maxing players who manage to net hundreds of thousands of gold in a month, that translates to just a few hundred dollars in spending money across the Blizzard ecosystem. That's not bad as far as in-game bonuses go, and it's somewhat comparable to the thousands of dollars author Julian Dibbell was able to net from a year's worth of dedicated Ultima Online gold farming over a decade ago.

In any case, we wouldn't recommend quitting your day job to become a tycoon in Blizzard's virtual coal mines.

Channel Ars Technica