The real-world housing market in the US has reached the most unaffordable levels in history, but if you want to buy a home in World of Warcraft, it should be much easier with the game recently adding player housing. To hype that up, Blizzard and the real estate marketplace Zillow have announced a custom “Zillow for Warcraft” website that allows people to browse in-game homes for World of Warcraft.
The website will look familiar to anyone who has browsed Zillow before, but in place of your local city is a map of Azeroth with homes dotted all over the place. Users can click on a home to see more photos and details about a property, like the “Seaside Shrine,” which has a grog station and a royal purple reading nook. Users can click “Contact Agent” to send an email to learn more about the property and how to move in.
Of course, the website is plastered with advertisements for World of Warcraft: Midnight, the upcoming expansion that releases on March 2. Player housing came to WoW back in December for people who preordered Midnight.
WoW players had been asking for player housing in the MMO for literal decades, and it’s finally in the game now ahead of the Midnight release. Blizzard is giving fans what they’ve asked for, and the company stands to benefit as well via new housing microtransactions that are now in the game.
People can spend real money on a new currency, Hearthsteel, and Blizzard said it is “player-friendly.” Blizzard maintained that the new currency was needed in order to make purchasing multiple, inexpensive items more “efficient” than simply selling them for real money.
In an interview with GameSpot, WoW housing principal game designer Jesse Kurlancheek said using Hearthsteel is also due to the Battle.net shop not having a shopping cart feature to batch together smaller purchases and because Blizzard needs to be mindful of “regulatory hurdles” when it comes to real-money purchases. He said using Hearthsteel also makes it easier for Blizzard to offer refunds.
WoW VP and executive producer Holly Longdale recently said in an interview she believes the Warcraft IP is “underutilized,” and that Blizzard has a “bigger vision” for WoW than “simply being an MMORPG.”
