Blizzard: How to make millions in minutes?

Today, let's do a hat trick! We are going to need a big, big hat! Let's call it Blizzard Entertainement, would you? Now, let's put something inside that hat. Let say... a huge community of fanboys (and fangirls as well), which has its own rules, and its economy (or kind of). Ready? Now let the magic begin... but, wait! We need magic words! Here they are: "World of Warcraft". And now, what do you obtain? A little shiny pony!

I'm not kidding. Okay, the pony hadn't really this design. Nontheless, that what happened on 15th April 2010. Blizzard Entertainement decided to propose to sell a limited edition of a  mount (understandable as a ridable animal friend), whose design was quite... unusual... in his massively multiplayer online video game World of Warcraft. The virtual pet was sold massively, some bloggers entered the virtual queue in order to make some calculations (people waiting for it, price and products still available), and they estimated Blizzard made some millions in a matter of minutes.

Is this madness? Instead of replying "No, this is Sparta", I would rather say, that could be related to the luxury market. To make it simple: "this item/product is rare and expensive, so not everybody would have it, so I have to buy it". In real life, the same goes for people... okay, girls and women who can spend huge amounts of money in some clothes or only one bag. The same for expensive cars, men.

The pony was sold for 25 dollars, and I don't think it's necessary to recall that WoW players already pay a monthly subscription to play the game (around 12 euros per month). It's easy mathematics to know the average budget of regular gamers.

The Blizzard store page of the mount

The article

Two bloggers who made calculations of Blizzard sales: here and here.

Angèle Rebergue.