World of Warcraft Celestial Steed

When the pet store first opened up, millions of WoW subscribers purchased the first pets including the Make-A-Wish kung fu panda.  The original pets were amazingly successful but people wanted mounts.

Ryan Arbogast, Blizzard’s public relations specialist, told Kotaku that the public demanded special mounts.

“After we launched the Pet Store, we received many requests to offer mounts as well. We created the Celestial Steed as a result of those requests, and the response from the community — including all of the players here at Blizzard — has been very positive,” said Arbogast.

Thus, the first player mount was born.

The Celestial Steed sells for $25 and is bound to an individual player's account, which will receive access to the mount on all characters past and present.  The mount adjusts itself to your individual character’s riding ability.

For example, if you can only ride an epic ground mount then that's all it can do, but if you have a 310% flying mount then that's the speed the Celestial Steed flies.  These mounts work much the same way as the paladin or warlock mounts in that you only need to purchase additional riding skill to improve the mount.

Over 2 million dollars worth of these stylish horses were sold in the first four hours alone.  Some websites are reporting Blizzard has made up to $20 million in one week.  Wow.com and Kotaku cite between 80,000 and 140,000 people were in queue to buy these imaginary mares.

I can confirm that at the time of my family members purchasing the item, the queue time was over 125,000.  The really strange part is on the right hand side was a monitor depicting how many of the item was left… as if they would run out.

With the next expansion of World of Warcraft around the corner one has to wonder, is Blizzard going to bother making expansions for World of Warcraft anymore?

Why not simply release a new mount every month for the next year.  At the rate of 2 million per four hours you're talking about $1 billion per year. If you were going to make a game or 12 mounts, which earn more money, which would you do?

Exactly.

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