by Its_Immanis - 5 years ago     show comments

In the flurry of news posts yesterday about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion – Shadowlands – one piece of news flew slightly under the radar that is a significant quality of life change for many people.

With early expansions physical copies of the game were always released starting at the time of the launch of the game. You couldn’t play the latest expansion until you dragged yourself down to GameStop at midnight to pick it up, drive home, enter your CD key, and then you could start playing.

For a lot of people this was a significant time investment.

With more recent expansions the advent of digital pre-purchasing has mostly eliminated this issue. You buy the game digitally ahead of time through Blizzard and as soon as the anointed hour arrives you’re in the new zones, no fuss no muss. They even created digital Collector’s Editions that only included the in-game goodies for those who wanted them. This still left the issue of those people (like me) who prefer to purchase the physical Collector’s Editions. Art books, mousepads, soundtracks, and other trinkets are included in this version that we like to have.

Previously the solution for Blizzard (which I’m sure worked out really well for them) was to encourage the users to continue to pre-purchase the physical Collector’s Edition and also digitally purchase the base expansion pack. This would give us immediate access to the game at the time of the launch and any benefits that came early (like early access to Demon Hunters prior to the release of Legion) and allow us to pick up our physical copy later. This created a problem for many players though because then we had two keys for a game most only play one character at a time with.

Blizzard’s response to this conundrum varied over the years. One solution was to regenerate a base license key we could give to a friend. This one didn’t work out so well because most of the people we played with would already have their keys. Some people used it on second accounts to get an extra character boost but not everyone did.

Another solution was to refund the original purchase in game time. This one worked out better, but still wasn’t perfect. It calculated out to (depending on the expansion) two or three(ish) months of subscription game time.

A third solution Blizzard provided was to refund the base purchase price in Battle.net balance. This was useful because you could get services or items from the shop or purchases for other games.

All of these solutions were good, but not ideal. Not everyone could or wanted to buy a second copy of the expansion, and they made it fairly well known.

This time around it seems like these players have been heard.

In an update to the announcement of the physical Shadowlands Collector’s Edition (the physical box that includes various digital and physical goodies) Blizzard revealed that this version would be shipping from retailers beginning October 13th, two weeks ahead of the worldwide launch of the expansion.

Let us know what you think of this latest change in distribution practices in the comments or on social media!