Alas, it's been estimated that WoW's $90 FOMO dinosaur mount probably made Blizzard around $15-17 million, and at this point I think we all deserve to be here

A herd of chaotic dinosaur mounts gathered in Dornogal, the capital city of The War Within.
(Image credit: Blizzard)

Dear reader, I have a lot of positive words to say about World of Warcraft recently. The way Blizzard and its developers have clawed their way back from the pits of hell in Shadowlands is downright commendable, and the game is in one of the best states it's been in in years. Not perfect, mind you. Rewards systems are still a little wobbly, and there are your usual barrel of glitches, but it's all a damn sight better.

But that $90 dinosaur mount, temporarily added to the store, which had a huge quality of life feature slapped onto the side? It's the most brazenly, transparently-engineered microtransactional nonsense move I've seen out of the company in quite some time. It's utter and complete rot, selling a mobile auction house at a premium for a small window—so that those who bought in have a permanent advantage? Gross. Naturally, though, a ton of players bought them and paraded them around Dornogal in some kind of prehistoric frenzy.

Well, turns out, in an estimate by WoWHead, it probably made Blizzard millions of dollars. Nearly $17 million, though this number comes with some caveats, which I'll get into in a moment.

The data boffins over on the site used a combination of Data for Azeroth and Raider.io to estimate how much cash Blizzard raked in. As explained on the post itself, Data for Azeroth has data for about 1 million accounts, and while it doesn't have data for the game's Chinese servers, it does have ones for North America, Europe, Taiwan, and Korea. That's a solid sample size, regardless.

Raider.io, meanwhile, has a bigger sample of accounts, and also tracks certain achievements like, for example, Mythic+ top percentile tryhards. This is a good measuring tape, because getting into the top 0.1% of a Mythic+ season is life-alteringly hard and, while it's possible there are some sweats who have multiple characters on an account with the achievement, it's pretty unlikely.

Let's take the "Cryptic Hero: Shadowlands Season 3" achievement, for example—Raider.io states about 2,536 players out of the entire playerbase achieved it across all regions. Trouble is, the achievement only gives you the top 0.1% of all Mythic+ players.

That's where this other website comes in. While Data for Azeroth only has around 1 million accounts on it, it also states that 0.1689% of characters in its sample size (which doesn't care about whether you're a Mythic+ player or not) got the same achievement. So you can just take Raider.io's number—2,536, in this case—and assume it's proportionate to the site's sample. Then you divide 100 by 0.1689, times 2,536 by that number, and hey presto—you've got a guestimate of the entire playerbase.

Do this across a bunch of seasons, take the average, and you've got an estimate of around 1,550,890 accounts. Then you just grab Data for Azeroth's percentage of players who have the Brontosaur—around 12%—and use that bigger number to determine that roughly 188,289 players bought it. Times that by the cost of the mount, and you've got almost $17 million in Blizzard's pocket.

There are a couple of things that could skew the numbers here, mind, such as multiple characters on an account having the same achievement. It's also not a test that works for mounts which are parts of giveaways, Twitch drops, or so on, since neither site differentiates between players getting a freebie or paying out of pocket. You can also use actual in-game WoW gold to buy the mount via the WoW token—which can be bought from the Auction House, and then turned in for Battle.net balance.

Mind, supposing a majority of players had used WoW tokens, that'd still leave a few million in Blizzard's pocket. Even then, using WoW Tokens to convert gold to Blizzard bucks still means that someone, somewhere, bought those tokens in the first place—and for a more beneficial amount of money. You needed to buy around $120's worth of WoW Tokens, with in-game gold, to get the battle.net balance for a dinosaur.

Anyway, all this to say: Yes, Blizzard probably made an absurd amount of money from the FOMO dino. While I don't think this sort of silliness is particularly healthy for the customer—and I'm not defending Blizzard's choice to do it—I can't say I'm surprised that they do so considering how incapable we all are of voting with our wallets. That's a huge amount of moolah for not a lot of work, and you do need money to make, run, and continue to justify a game's existence. This might not be the microtransactional future we want, but I reckon it's the one we deserve, since we keep hucking money at digital dinosaurs.

Best MMOsBest strategy gamesBest open world gamesBest survival gamesBest horror games

Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight

Harvey Randall
Staff Writer

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

Read more
Ibelin Redmoore, a character played by the late Mats Steen, looks across Stormwind Harbour with a detective fox friend.
WoW has raised over $2 million for charity CureDuchenne by selling a cute little fox, after being inspired by The Remarkable Life of Ibelin documentary
Bobby Kotick in 2008, after the Vivendi merger that made Activision into Activision Blizzard.
Bobby Kotick says he'd never have raised World of Warcraft's subscription by even a dollar because 'it's a prickly audience, you don't wanna do too much to agitate them'
World of Warcraft has a currency problem: more than 500 kinds of tender can currently be used in the 20-year-old game
A Vanu Vanu munches on a soft taco
Final Fantasy 14 is, you guessed it, still making bank for Square Enix as Dawntrail rakes in the big bucks, though it might not be all sunshine and tacos
Plunderstorm screenshot
WoW's Plunderstorm battle royale mode is much more popular the second time around: 'I can just play and screw around'
World of Warcraft The War Within screenshots
Dragonflight got WoW back on its feet, now we get to see if Blizzard can make the Worldsoul Saga run
Latest in World of Warcraft
WoW Classic: Season of Discovery
World of Warcraft Classic’s Season of Discovery may be teasing a legendary weapon that players have speculated is in the game for two decades
Gallywix wears an uneasy smile as he's confronted by Xal'atath in WoW: The War Within.
After 12 days and 100s of wipes, World of Warcraft's latest world first raid ends in anticlimax: 'That's the boss?!?'
A goblin with sharp teeth, wearing goggles, lets out a mischievous cackle in WoW's latest patch: Undermine(d).
The hooligan hacker guild that tore up WoW's newest raid (twice) just posted video evidence of the whole thing, and it's got me feeling weirdly nostalgic
Concept art of WoW's upcoming player housing system, showing a warm homestead with a welcoming figure in shade.
WoW flexes its MMO player housing system in a new blog post, and it really might just beat FF14's dated furniture placement into the dirt
Gallywix wears an uneasy smile as he's confronted by Xal'atath in WoW: The War Within.
World of Warcraft guild uses exploits to get world 'first' on the game's new raid, gets banned, puts its name backwards and does it again
A World of Warcraft dwarf and human character standing in front of the entrance to a delve dungeon
WoW's nerfed its poor Delve companion into a dwarf-shaped crater after his tank spec made them too easy, and people aren't happy
Latest in News
The jester from Balatro, portrayed in unsettling detail in real life, wears an uncanny smile and stares at the viewer.
Balatro's LocalThunk isn't 'trying to pull a Banksy', he just 'wanted to be left alone to make his game'
Two characters from Warframe 1999 lounging in a bar.
The warframe with a guitar that shoots fire is out today alongside a bunch of metalcore-inspired skins, cementing Warframe's spiral into Y2K madness
A Minecraft movie promo image of the main cast standing side by side,
This is why the Minecraft movie is called A Minecraft Movie
helldivers 2 democratic detonation
Johan Pilestedt warns that Helldivers 2 took 4 more years than planned because Arrowhead skipped pre-production and dove right in: 'Always do your homework before you start spending millions and millions and millions of dollars in making a game'
helldivers 2 arrowhead CCO johan pilestedt
Helldivers 2's Johan Pilestedt says developers need to start taking more risks: 'Safe bets are a death sentence for the studios that try to make them'
Split Fiction trailer still - Zoe and Mio staring into a large pipe
A pair of Split Fiction players will be heading to Sweden for an early look at Hazelight's next game after completing a secret challenge so tough, some developers can 'barely' beat it