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Blizzard recently celebrated World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary by selling a $90 version of a mount that cost approximately $475 just six years ago, and it's estimated it made the company $15 million.
Back in October, WoW players could buy the Trader's Gilded Brutosaur mount for $90. It's essentially a cheaper version of the old Reins of the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur mount. It's special because it has two slots for NPC vendors that can sell goods or repair armor, and it gives you remote access to the auction house.
This new $90 version offsets the need to buy the original on the black market, which often sells for upwards of 5 million gold. The Gilded Brutosaur was seemingly popular enough to cause some economic issues within the game, most notably a spike in scarcity for WoW tokens, so the folks over at Wowhead wanted to figure out how much money Blizzard has likely made off it.
I'm not going to get stuck into the methodology used – I quit engineering for a reason – but the original article goes into a lot of detail about account ownership. The short version is, Wowhead checked player data from two sources to figure out the percentage of accounts that own the mount. Then it's a simple case of multiplying how many accounts own the mount by $90. 188,289 accounts at $90 a pop brings the total to $16,946,010.
Wowhead notes some of the shortcomings of its method. Firstly, multiple characters on a single account could have purchased the mount multiple times, so the number could be higher. Then there's also the fact that players could have traded in WoW tokens to buy the mount, which would mean Blizzard made less real money. Additionally, there's issues with how accurate the data is as one of the sources used only provides it on demand, so again, the number could be higher.
So, while $16,946,010 is a decent estimate, only Blizzard knows for sure how much the Gilded Brutosaur has made in the last few months. That said, the number seems high either way.
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