Destiny 2 is leading to gold deflation in World of Warcraft

Real-world value of in-game gold dips 7 percent since Battle.net announcement.

By Kyle Orland - 5/22/2017, 11:28 AM

Careful, friend... while you were sleeping, the real-world value of that gold pile just went down a bit.

Activision's decision to sell Destiny 2 through Blizzard's Battle.net (or the Blizzard app, if you insist on calling it that) is already having ripple effects throughout the platform. Look no further than World of Warcraft, where the real-world value of in-game gold has sunk quickly in the wake of the announcement, according to the tracker at WoWToken.info.

The in-game auction price of a WoW Token—which can be exchanged for $15 in credit on other Battle.net games—settled at around 120,000 gold pieces on North American servers this morning.

That's up from a price of about 110,000 gold pieces just before the Destiny 2 announcement threw the market into turmoil, causing the Token price to briefly spike to over 140,000 gold on Thursday evening.

The result looks to be about a 7 percent decline in the real-world buying power of a piece of WoW gold in less than a week. Put another way, the functional price of a $60 copy of Destiny 2 in WoW gold jumped from just under 450,000 gold pieces to just over 480,000 in a matter of days. An incredibly focused, min-maxing gold farmer could still earn that gold in a month or two of dedicated WoW play, though.

Further Reading

World of Warcraft gold can now be used to buy other Blizzard items

 

While WoW Token prices show minor fluctuations throughout each day, the last time the market saw this much turbulence was back in February, when Blizzard first allowed Tokens to be sold for Battle.net credit. Before that, Tokens could only be used to purchase World of Warcraft subscription time and were considered much less valuable at the in-game auction markets.

 Since the change, the in-game value of a Token has slowly grown about 22 percent over the course of about three months, from about 90,000 gold pieces on February 15 up to about 110,000 last week.

Looked at another way, the Destiny announcement condensed about a month's worth of "natural" gold deflation into a single weekend.

As Bungie rolls out suspected plans for microtransaction-based purchases in Destiny 2, we may see in-game demand for the WoW Token increase even further in the coming months. If you're looking to trade one video game addiction for another, we recommend trading in that WoW loot for pre-emptive Destiny funds sooner rather than later.

 

Kyle Orland Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.

 

Email kyle.orland@arstechnica.com // Twitter @KyleOrl