May 7, 2007
Warcraft has its own rewards
World of Warcraft players can now have their own specially designed credit card, although real-world purchases do not translate into virtual currency rewards in the world’s most popular online role-playing game.
WoW, with more than 8.5m players worldwide, has combined with Visa and First National Bank of Omaha to offer the card, with Reward Points being awarded that can be exchanged for free playing time.
With their first purchase, subscribers are awarded 1500 points, enough to play the game free for a month. Subsequent purchases will earn one point per dollar. There are 13 designs featuring WoW characters to choose.
Interestingly, Blizzard, WoW’s developer, has chosen not to reward the credit card’s users with the virtual currency of gold. It has tried to keep ways of earning the currency inside the game and has opposed real-money trades of its gold on sites such as eBay. Ebay itself instituted a ban in January on sales of virtual goods.
But the WoW card brings one step closer a prediction that credit cards will soon earn their users virtual money rather than real money, from Second Life’s Linden dollars to Eve Online’s ISK.
Further reading: Eve Online is as much business classroom as hypercapitalist playground.
