WoW Forever Launch: The Beta Cost 42 Cents a Day. I Did the Maths.

Transcript

The Autopsy — forty-two cents a day

I worked out what the WoW Forever beta cost me: forty-two cents a day. It shut on October twenty-third, and when I last read Blizzard's announcement, it still came with the pack you can still buy.

"Your WoW subscription or game time grants you access to WoW: Forever starting November 4"¹⁶. That's Blizzard's store page, as Warcraft Tavern copied it. One sentence, no asterisk. Then you scroll down, and there's a table with three columns of ticks, and I paid for the column on the right, so I'm the corpse and the coroner.

The Autopsy — launch day

Hello, living. WoW Forever launches on November fourth. Servers open at three p.m. Pacific¹, and somewhere a guild leader's already written a spreadsheet for the first hour. Nobody's dying. Some prices are.

Here's my confession, and it's the reason I'm allowed to do this one. I bought the Epic Pack. I was in the beta from the first night, Undead warlock, Horde, the free race, standing in the Undercity with a sixty-dollar elf licence I never used. So this is my bill as much as yours, and I've finally done what nobody does with a bill, which is read it.

The Autopsy — the menu

You know the three packs. I've said those prices on this channel more times than my own name. Quick reminder, then I'm doing something new with them. Twenty-nine ninety-nine, fifty-nine ninety-nine, seventy-nine ninety-nine⁶. And the game itself is fourteen ninety-nine a month, like it's been for twenty years. TweakTown put it plainly: you'll pay "the $14.99/month subscription fee in order to play"⁹.

Everybody compares the sticker. Nobody subtracts. Each tier includes the one below it, so the honest question is what the extra thirty dollars buys you, once you take out the stuff you'd have paid for anyway. I did the subtraction. With a calculator, because I'm dead, not stupid.

The Autopsy — what the extra thirty buys

Here's what the Epic adds on top of the Heroic, in the store's own words. The beta. Thirty days of Game Time. "plus a matching bear mount and transmog set, tabards, and a family of pets"¹⁴. And two more friend codes¹⁵. A family of pets. They're a zergling, a panda, a tiny Diablo and something called a Pachimari. That's not a family. That's a custody hearing.

The Autopsy — the subtraction

So, line one. Epic minus Heroic is thirty dollars flat. Line two, the thirty days of Game Time, which starts on launch day², and a month of that is fourteen ninety-nine at the till. Take it off. Line three, what's left. Fifteen dollars and one cent. That's what the beta cost, plus a bear, a family of pets and two codes.

Line four, per day. The beta opened September seventeenth¹⁷ and the doors shut October twenty-third⁸. Thirty-six days. Fifteen-oh-one over thirty-six is about forty-two cents a day. Forty-two cents a day to be Blizzard's unpaid QA department, which, honestly, is the cheapest I've ever been hired.

The Autopsy — what forty-two cents bought

And to be fair to them, it was a lot of beta for forty-two cents. They raised the population cap, then raised it again, and one of them posted, "So... we had to increase the WoW: Forever Beta population cap again"¹². Microsoft's boss, Satya Nadella, brought it up on an earnings call, and TweakTown's write-up says WoW Forever "has gone down in history as the largest-ever beta for the Warcraft franchise"¹³. Which is lovely for the shareholders. I was there, and what I mostly remember is a forty-minute queue to get killed by a rogue named after a cheese. Brie. He was called Brie, and he was a little shit.

So here's my forty-two cents, itemised, since I'm doing bills. Night one, I made a lock, walked out of the Undercity, and the server fell over before I reached the bat handler. Night three, my first dungeon, where a tank who'd never tanked pulled the whole room and blamed lag, and honestly, fair, there was lag. Around week two, I found the one quest in Silverpine that sends you back and forth five times, and I filed a bug report nobody's ever read. Thirty-six days of that. I'd do it again. Don't tell them.

Here's the knife, though. That beta's over. It shut on the twenty-third. And Blizzard's own announcement, when I read it on October twenty-ninth, still said "Beta access is included with the Skyborne Epic Pack and the Warcraft Forever Collection"⁴. The Collection's on sale until January. So if you buy one now, your fifteen dollars and one cent buys the bear, the pets and two codes. That's the price it cost when it came with a five-week head start. Nobody's lying, technically. The page just describes a door that's already been bricked up.

Take that line off the fucking page.

And it's not the only bricked-up door on the bill. The Heroic Pack, the cheap one, came with Early Name Reservation, and Blizzard's own dates for that were "from October 27 through November 3"¹⁹. So the headline perk of the twenty-nine ninety-nine pack ends the night before the game opens. Anyone buying it after that gets the elf, the island, the cosmetics and a reservation for a party that's already over. I got my name. I'm not telling you which one, because some of you are rogues. But everyone else types theirs in at three o'clock on launch day with the rest of the living, and it's honestly fine, because every character gets two names anyway. The rush was always mostly in our heads. Blizzard just put a price on the panic.

The Autopsy — the Collection, subtracted

Next tier up. The Collection is twenty dollars more than the Epic⁶. What does twenty buy? Warcraft Three: Reforged, and a new campaign called Forsaken Kingdom, plus a figurine for your house¹⁴. Forsaken Kingdom. That's my people. I'd be offended that Blizzard's charging extra for a story about us, except I've been charging the living for my opinion for weeks, so we're even.

The Collection's also on a clock. It's sold "through January 11, 2027"⁵. And I'll give it this, it's the only line on the bill where the subtraction comes out in your favour, if you actually want Warcraft Three. If you don't, it's twenty dollars for a little statue of a Forsaken, and I'm right here, rotting, for free, every week.

The Autopsy — the one you can't buy

There's a fourth tier you can't buy at all. A physical Collector's Edition, a hundred and fifty dollars. Blizzard Watch checked the store the day after the reveal: "it is currently listed as sold out on the store page"⁷. Sold out in a day. So the most expensive way to play a game about a dying world is already a collector's item. That's the most World of Warcraft thing I've ever typed into a spreadsheet.

The Autopsy — the codes

Now the friend codes, because this is where the pack actually does some good. The Heroic gives you one, the Epic and the Collection give you three¹⁵. A friend with a code gets in "from November 4 through November 11, 2026, PST"³. And that's the cheapest thing on the whole bill. It costs your friend nothing, and it's the only line on the page that brings another living person into the game, which is what keeps a world alive. Ask any server that died. So here's a little sum. If you hand out all three, the extra codes are worth more to the game than the bear is worth to you.

One week, though. On the twelfth, your friend's a ghost with a credit card prompt.

The Autopsy — launch day, three ways in

So here's the whole bill, counted, three ways into the same game. Way one, the sub: fourteen ninety-nine for the month, and you get the whole world, every class, every free race. Way two, the elf: the Heroic Pack plus a month, forty-four ninety-eight. Way three, the Epic, fifty-nine ninety-nine, which is way two plus fifteen dollars and one cent of cosmetics and codes. And the Collection, seventy-nine ninety-nine, is way three plus Warcraft Three.

Look at the gap between way one and way two. Twenty-nine ninety-nine is the cost of the race. Everything else in the game is the same fourteen ninety-nine. One race is worth two months of the entire game, according to the till. I'm Undead. We're free. I've never felt more correctly priced.

And Blizzard knows exactly how many of you want wings, because the beta told them. Everyone in the beta had the elf, it came with the ticket. Classic Plus volunteers counted the characters, and Icy Veins reported the share: Skyborne "made up a combined 18.7% of characters"¹⁸. Most-picked race in the game. So when the race was free, about one player in five took it. That's not a guess on their part. That's a price sheet, and you filled it in for them, at forty-two cents a day.

The Autopsy — my prescription

One more sum, and it's the nice one. Say you play two hours a night for the month, which, be honest, is a low estimate for launch week. That's sixty hours for fourteen ninety-nine, about twenty-five cents an hour. It's the cheapest thing you'll do all night that isn't sleeping, and the dead don't sleep, so for me it's just the cheapest thing. And if you already know you're staying, Blizzard's put Forever-only cosmetics on the twelve-month sub¹⁰, which is a bear trap, but at least it's an honest bear trap. It tells you it's a year.

So, if you're standing at the store, here's the prescription. Buy the month. Just the month. Final Boss's review said it better than I'd say it with a straight face: "The standard subscription remains the sensible test"¹¹. Play the free races for thirty days. If you're still logging in on day thirty, and you still want wings, the Heroic Pack will still be there. It's not going anywhere. That's the whole point of a pack.

And if you already bought the Epic, like me, it's fine. You didn't get robbed, you got a damn good bear. You paid forty-two cents a day to be early, and early was fun. I got ganked at the Crossroads before most of you had a username. I just wanted you to see the number before you do it again. There'll be a next expansion, and there'll be a column on the right.

Tell me in the comments which way you came in. Sub, elf, Epic, or Collection. And if you bought the Collection for Warcraft Three, I want to know if you've installed it. Be honest. The dead can tell.

Cause of Death

Cause of death, for the beta line on the bill: still printed after the thing it sold had closed. Time of death, October twenty-third, ten a.m. Pacific. The game, though, is very much alive, and on launch night so is everyone you used to raid with. Fourteen ninety-nine. That's the real price of the best part. The rest is wings.

Next time

If the elf's still tempting you, my Obituary on the most-picked beta race is the short version of the same bill. And the Pre-Mortem has five ways this could go wrong, with dates, and I'm grading it in December. I'll be in the queue. Forever.