It’s only taken a single day for Blizzard’s WoW Tokens, which can be redeemed for World of Warcraft game time, to dip in value. WoW Tokens can be purchased for $20 or 30,000 in-game gold. The latter of the two prices can change with the in-game market, however, and it has. You can now buy WoW tokens for almost 25 percent off their original price.
A day after launching a WoW Token is worth about 22,631 gold instead of the original 30,000. The implication is that a lot of Auction House entrepreneurs had the same idea: buy a bunch of WoW Tokens and then sell them in-game for quick, legal gold, devaluing them as the tidal wave of game time tokens saturated the market.
22,631 isn’t really a lot of gold, either. For a new player, it probably seems like an impossibly huge number, but this is a 10 year old game experiencing a second wind. There are a lot of players, and a lot of max-level characters with big bank accounts.
The dip might be temporary, or it might continue – World of Warcraft’s economy might not mimic the real one to the same degree as EVE Online, but it’s just as temperamental.
Cheers, VentureBeat.