WoW Tokens Coming Tomorrow, Buy Game Time with Gold

For the longest time now, World of Warcraft has resisted the popular trend in MMO’s to go free to play, where just about every other subscription-based game has bucked. Granted, they’ve largely bucked because subscriptions are expensive and most MMO players already have a subscription to WoW, but still, even the king of MMO’s is feeling the pressure from fans to adopt a cheaper model to make the premier MMORPG more accessible.

Well, WoW will stay pay-to-play for a while yet, but now we’re taking a step in the free-to-play direction with tomorrow’s release of WoW Tokens. Check out the video below for the full feature.



In summery, you can now buy $20 tokens in the in-game store, which are fairly useless on their own. However, you can sell them for a gigantic chunk of in-game gold in the Auction House (It’s going to start at 30,000 gold, but supply and demand will cause the price to flux) to other players, who can buy them and redeem them for 30 days of extra play time.

Seem simple enough? Yes, but there are some caviats.

To prevent gold flooding, you can only buy ten tokens every thirty days. Plus, clever players will have noticed something suspicious about the price of the token: at twenty dollars, it’s actually five dollars more expensive than a regular one-month subscription to World of Warcraft, so you’re actually paying more for 30 days of game time with in-game tokens than you would be via a subscription.

Anyway, it’ll be included in the next patch, which comes out tomorrow, so if you have a lot of gold in a dead account, maybe think of this as an opportunity to dip back in. Otherwise… I suppose it doesn’t affect you much, in my experience you’d have to play WoW as a full-time job to get 30k gold in a month, so good for filling in gaps between paychecks I guess but not exactly a game-changer.