Blizzard Offering Free Trial of Auction House App

There are many World of Warcraft players who basically play half their game in the auction house. I personally know of a gamer who has made thousands of gold pieces buying and selling there (*cough* Derrick). The only problem these people have is that they only have so many hours in the day to log in to World of Warcraft to run auction house sessions.

Their problems are over (or just beginning, depending on your point of view.)

Blizzard has announced that they’re giving a free trial of their new Auction House app that allows you to check in on Auction Houses remotely from your iOS device. As the ad states, it’ll allow you to “buy, sell, chat – anytime, anywhere”, which is a very scary thought for WoW widows. (Unless, of course, those significant others are also WoW gamers.)

Another app allows remote guild chatting, which is nice when you want to be in contact with your guild 24 hours a day, too.

The app will charge $2.99 a month after the free trial. Check both apps out here.

(Thanks, RPS.)

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Do you really need them all? No, not really. You’ll need to keep some on board in order to “brain dump” your job onto others and hopefully stick around for the long hall. Some employees will probably be shuffled to other job responsibilities while some get packages and a thank you card.

These are some of the growing pains when working towards a successful merger, so don’t be surprised or start spreading rumors when a few people are let go. As someone who’s gone through it in two big mergers I can say that certain departments already know their fate ahead of time. Many IT and sales folk start looking for new jobs the minute the merger is announced.

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Once upon a time the folks at Blizzard Entertainment thought they could support the entire world of World of Wacraft by ad revenue. This would have created an MMO experience which would cost you nothing but a bit of annoyance by ad providers; what would the total audience be if the game was free?

Had WoW launched free of charge they would probably have significantly more users playing the game, but the ad revenue from the sheer amount of people would be nothing compared to a monthly charge for eight million subscribers.

Although only a small number of those subscribers are US based, they’re still raking in the cash compared to an ad-based model, even if they were to have triple the subscribers.

However, the Blizzard exec noted: “We didn’t want to charge a subscription, but as we researched market conditions, we realized that wouldn’t support us.”

It’s possible, perhaps, that Blizzard would have fallen under its own weight had they created a world where anyone could play for no charge. Imagine the server utilization, the volume of traffic and the support calls they would get for triple or quadrupal the player base with only ads paying the checks.

Granted, a free system would be excellent in theory, but in practice, making us pay is the only way to throttle our addictions. Sad, but true.

(Thanks, gamasutra)