It’s been a few days since Bungie’s highly anticipated Destiny 2 gameplay reveal, an hour-long event that ended up focusing more on quality-of-life improvements than any of the story content being prepared for the sequel. Public opinion about the project has been mixed, with some calling the project “ Destiny 1.5,” but there’s one community that can’t hide its excitement for Destiny 2.
I’m talking about Battle.net users.
Over the weekend, Kotaku UK spotted a massive spike in the gold value of World of Warcraft tokens. For the uninitiated, Tokens were introduced in 2015. At launch, players could spend $20 (the current real-money cost of a new Token) or 30,000 in-game gold. Upon acquisition, tokens could either be cashed out (for 30K gold) or to add an additional 30 days of playtime to an account. The idea was to give dedicated World of Warcraft players, particularly those who have mastered the ups and downs of the Auction House, a chance to convert some of their excess gold into something a bit more useful. Earlier this year, Blizzard also gave fans the option of converting the $20 tokens into $15 worth of Battle.net credit – a no-brainer for those buying with gold but kind of a raw deal for cash customers. It’s a system that should be familiar to any EVE Online player and one that’s proved especially popular with Overwatch and Hearthstone players. Now, WoW fans are scrambling to purchase enough tokens to cover the cost of Destiny 2 – whenever it finally hits Battle.net – and the rush has pushed the gold value of WoW Tokens to record heights.
Tokens may have only been 30,000 gold when the program launched two years ago; however, the average gold price hasn’t been that low in quite some time. The previous record high, 111,269 per token, was reached shortly after the Battle.net credit announcement (back in February). But the price had settled to around 95-100K in recent weeks. Then came the Destiny 2 reveal and confirmation that Bungie’s shared-world shooter would be the first non-Blizzard game featured on the company’s platform. And prices exploded, shooting north of 140,000 gold per token before finally resettling around 120,000 each. That’s four times the original purchasing cost, when tokens hit the market, and a 20 percent increase from a week ago.
The good news is that prices have been trending back down for a few days now, as low as 118K gold per token over the weekend, suggesting there will at least be a short window of time in which less-wealthy World of Warcraft players might be able to bank a few tokens for Destiny 2, or just to keep your WoW subscription active. But it’s probably safe to assume a similar spike will follow the Destiny 2 PC release date announcement, followed by a third jump during the final countdown to that launch. And there will be plenty of Battle.net users hoping to benefit from those spikes, so it’s probably safe to assume prices will continue to rise as we get closer to the Destiny 2 release date.
Destiny 2 is in development for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. The console versions of the game will debut Sept. 8. There’s currently no timeline for Destiny 2’s Battle.net release.
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes and follow Scott on Twitter for more Destiny 2 news in 2017 and however long Bungie supports Destiny 2 in the years following launch.
