The Bizarre Effect Destiny 2 Is Having On World Of Warcraft

We learned a heck of a lot about Destiny 2 during last week's big gameplay reveal, but perhaps one of the most interesting tidbits to come out of that daylong affair actually took place in a totally unrelated game, World of Warcraft.

While the team at Bungie was eager to roll out all kinds of details concerning Destiny 2 last week, one of the biggest surprises was the fact that the game will be launching on the Blizzard app, rather than the platform everyone expected, Steam. That probably shouldn't have been so shocking considering the fact that Destiny now falls under the Blizzard/Activision banner, but it still sent out quite a ripple. Said ripple was actually felt in World of Warcraft, where the in-game gold market went into something of a tailspin.

Earlier this year, Blizzard announced that players would be able to use Tokens in World of Warcraft in order to earn credit through Battle.net. These Tokens could be purchased for in-game gold, which can also be freely traded through the in-game auction houses. In other words, Blizzard wanted to incentivize folks for playing their game. Spend enough time playing WoW, for instance, and you could buy enough Tokens to then get the next expansion or a shiny new mount at no actual cost out of pocket.

The trick here is that those Tokens work across all games on Blizzard's marketplace. So, if you play the game enough, you could literally earn enough Tokens to flat-out buy Destiny 2 when it launches on the platform this fall. According to the initial report from Ars Technica, it will take a dedicated player two to three months to save up enough gold to buy that many Tokens, so you might want to get started if you plan on getting the new Bungie game gratis.

But, it's for that reason that the in-game market went a bit sideways after last week's announcement concerning the Destiny 2 launch on PC. It looks like about a 7 percent decline in the "real-world buying power" of World of Warcraft gold has been the result of these revelations. In other words, once folks learned they could buy Destiny 2 with WoW gold, the market flooded with the stuff. Said flood means the price had to come down, which is good news for folks who want to go that route.

As the original report puts it, this single announcement concerning D2 on Battle.net affected the WoW market overnight to a degree that otherwise takes about three months. That's pretty impressive and goes to show that economics really can be applied to video games!