Hearthstone is Getting More Expensive for Players in Canada, Japan, and New Zealand on Nov 16
Attention! It looks like pack prices on Battle.net are not the same as Google Play and are actually cheaper.
Looking specifically at Canada, players will be charged $62.99 CAD, or $49.39 USD at current exchange rates for the expansion pre-order. This post's numbers are no longer accurate but are being kept for historical purposes. Pitchforks can be laid to rest for now!
Pricing changes are coming to Battle.net! Players in Canada, Japan, and New Zealand are currently charged in USD but starting tomorrow, players in these regions will be charged in their local currencies.
- The changes affect prices on Battle.net, In-Game Shops, and your Blizzard Balance.
- Blizzard Balance you currently have in USD will convert using the exchange rate when the transition occurs.
It should be noted that when Hearthstone last updated, the prices on Google Play changed to the point where it's actually more expensive to buy things in these currencies due to the exchange rate being better than what they've priced packs at. If this same pricing applies to Battle.net, you're better buying the Kobolds pre-order now to save some money.
Country | New Price | Price Today | Price Increase | USD Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
Canada | C$69.99 | C$63.86 | C$6.13 | $4.80 |
Japan | 6000¥ | 5646¥ | 355¥ | $3.14 |
New Zealand | NZ$79.99 | NZ$72.69 | NZ$7.30 | $5.02 |
As seen in the above table, we've got price increases across the board for these regions assuming Blizzard will be charging the same price on Battle.net that they are charging on Google Play, which in order to be in terms with Google Play's policies, they will need to be.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, it's understandable that they want to keep round pricing as it's easier to understand for consumers, and currencies do fluctuate on a daily basis. By charging a bit more than the day-to-day exchange rate, Blizzard is preventing themselves from losing any money when things may change in favor of the above countries.
Does it need to be as steep of an increase as it is though? Could they not simply adjust their pack prices more often if they need to be increased for certain countries based on their economic situations? Tell us what you think about it in the comments.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have an expansion to pre-order before tomorrow.
Blog Post
Quote from BlizzardIn October, we announced that we’ll be converting from USD to local currency on Blizzard Battle.net® in Canada, Japan, and New Zealand. These changes will begin to roll out in these regions within the next 24 hours.
For players in these regions, Blizzard Balance will be unavailable during the brief update process, but purchases can be made using other payment methods. Any purchases made during this period will be processed in local currency.
For World of Warcraft® subscribers, the recurring subscription will continue to be charged in USD for the next 12 months. If there’s any interruption to your subscription, however—including an expired card, changes in payment methods, or account cancellations—any new subscriptions will be charged in your local currency.
We want to make as many of our players as possible feel at home in the Blizzard ecosystem, and make managing your account with us easier. By switching from USD to local currency, we’re expanding the types of payment we accept and helping some of you avoid paying transaction fees charged by financial institutions.
Please see our announcement in October for more information and follow @BlizzardCSfor the latest updates.
Asking 50$ every 3 months but Rogue still has no board clear. Making prices higher in certain regions. Pay more than 1$ for 5 non-physical, non sellable cards. Account gets banned if you choose to sell it. Print some broken cards and fill the rest of expansion with trash. Give players free trash cards before release so they feel like they got something. Nerfs (that come after months) will literally destroy any card and make it unplayable, instead of trying to balance it. People still keep buying and shoving money up Team5's asses.
= Ben Brode (no space)
1. Got to us.battle.net/shop/en/
2. Buy packs for USD
3. ????
4. Profit!
How is this game getting even more expensive? The prices already are way too high for what you get (first of all non-physical cards, second you don't get enough legendaries or dust), but I am sorry, I forgot that Blizzard is a small indie company that really needs every cent they can get. Pathetic, and Ben Brode keeps laughing and laughing..
50$ every 3 months for a coinflip game, no thanks.
Everyone complaining about the cost of HS clearly has never played a Collectible Card Game before.
With HS, I buy the preorder for each expansion and manage to get the rest of the cards via Dust and Gold. Paying with amazon coins, you don't even have to spend 50€ per expansion that way.
Back in my YuGiOh days, I spent 200€+ whenever a new expansion was released (sneak preview and at 3-4 boxes of packs). I wasn't even close to get a full set of the expansion but as I "just" played the game, that didn't bother me much. I still wasn't able to build all the decks I wanted with what I got from my packs and bought/traded for additional cards on top of that.
A friend of mine, who collected the cards, bought at least 6 boxes per expansion and still needed to buy/trade on top of that, as in YuGiOh, a full set meant to get 3 copies of each and every card, no matter the rarity. Also, YuGiOh has way more expansions per year.
And please don't start arguing, that these cards are real and therefore worth money, when you don't need them. There are way more pack fillers in YGO than in HS, and Crap-YGO-Commons are sold by weight, for cents
You were doing Yugioh completely wrong then. You could buy full sets for $100-$150 depending on the set. Good luck obtaining a full HS set for $100-$150. That's not to mention you can re-sell the Yugioh set, and as soon as you buy the HS set it's worth $0. You could also buy "tier 1" decks in Yugioh for about $50-100, good luck doing the same in Hearthstone. Again, you could re-sell the Yugioh deck, good luck re-selling the Hearthstone deck!
I'd really like you to show me a site where you can get a full set for 150 USD. As I said, I consider a "full set" to be 3 copies of each card. A regular YGO set has 100 cards, so you would be paying 50 cents per card on average if you needed 3 copies each. That is absolutely ridiculous. Even if you only want one copy each that is a stretch for current sets. Just take a look at that, for example: https://toywiz.com/yugioh-circuit-break-secret-rare-evenly-matched-cibr-en077/
Same with tier 1 decks for 100 USD. Granted, I live in Germany and played here, but when I visited the US for a tournament on two different occasions (YCS Chantilly and YCS Orlando) or when I bought on ebay in the US, the prices there weren't much different to ours. So I doubt that in times of Dark Armed Dragon, where a full deck approached the 1.000€ mark, the prices in the US were that much cheaper. Sure, some formats also had cheap decks that were competitive, but same goes for HS.
Let's see what we can build with 100 USD in HS then, shall we?
Using the preorder, 100 USD get's us 90 packs.
According to the drop rates (https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/hearthstone/topic/17616133541) and the "One Legendary in the first 10 packs"-rule, we will get on average:
5 Legendaries
18 Epics
70 Rares
357 Commons
This equals 5365 Dust.
Note that the observed drop rates are even higher than that (https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Card_pack#Statistics), I did not account for Golden cards and I assume that you have to dust everything fromm your pack opening to craft the desired Tier1 deck. Even then, you are able to get half of the Dust you need for a current Tempo Rogue list. And you can easily afford a current Tier 2 Deck, if I am reading the current Tempostorm meta report correctly.
And contrary to YGO, where prices for cards on the secondary market fluctuated greatly, HS cards retain their value. In game, that is, by means of dust, but dust can replace your cold hard cash if you don't want to use that.
... hope someday they will FINALLY decide to LOWER the prices for ONCE..
I don't remember a time when they announced a reduction in prices..
The price of the game is the core issue in the delay on nerfs or changes overall also in their magnitude! if people could adapt to changes fast enough they could more freely change the game they just need to improve the reward system in the game it can't be the same as in beta...
Maybe it's time for Blizzard to think about adding some in-game ADS to get some more bunch of bucks? ;)
Do you think that doing that they would stop rising the prices? Because I don't believe so.
First expansion i will not buy or spend a dollar on.
Same here...
Expect some grim "patrons" at the next tournament or announcement stream.
I quit hearthstone 3 months ago (and started Clash of Clans instead). Turns out that this game is less expensive and frustrating but even more fun than Hurtstone. This was the best thing I ever did in this year and I have to say I don‘t regret it :D (just tune in on hearthpwn from time to time to see what Blizzard is doing with their game but I won‘t really install it again)
I have been playing hearthstone since the beginning of beta and I got hooked. I bought every expansion, and hero (Khadgar) with in-game gold and with real money, and even collected heroes like Liadrin, Arthas, Tyrande, and Maiev but it is getting ridiculous that blizzard is trying to cash grab us with extra costs on top of a silly exchange rate that doesn't reflect the market. I am greatly considering of quitting hearthstone since it has been increasingly costly to continue playing the game. Each expansion for me as a Canadian is almost the cost of a triple AAA title which I could rather be spending my money on. I don't blame people who are in the same situation as me.
I am sad to see so many people here or on reddit leaving or considering to leave HS because of its cost, and even more since I am becoming one of them.
I love the game, I have played since beta, bought all pre order or adventures and more, I love the competitive scene, and so on. But it is getting to expensive to keep up. I mean to be able to play any deck you want in the meta you need around 80% of all the cards in a set.
With a preorder and 60 additional packs you probably get bearly more than 50% of the pack.
I saw a lot of suggestions from the community to fix this, like raising the amont of dust you get when decrafting, or lowering craft cost, and others things. But we dont even know if the devs are considering anything.
So many people talked about gwent and I tried it out. It is pretty fun and mostly you have really a lot of rewards. It feels great
Blizard made fun of ea on twitter but like someone said before it would be a great time to grant HS community requests and do something about this issue :/
I'd love it if blizard adressed this issue in a close future, otherwise I might quit this game I had enjoyed for a few years now
This is so frustrating, I always have to try and justify paying real money for adventures and preorders, now that the price is pretty much the same as any brand new full fledged PC game, I finally have a reason to stop paying real money for extra cards for just one game.
Been F2P since April guess I'm F2P till I uninstall when I can't build any decks in a couple months :(
I am no longer going to buy any packs from hearthstone, i may just quit the game all together.
I'm glad the capitalism is ruling the world!
Well, I can't blame Blizzard trying to cover their products against exchange rates but I think they are loosing more money with the abuse against consumers ($$$). Nobody forces you to buy but, HS is so addictive for some people they want to win (and be recognized) so badly it's like raising the price of any drug: they will still buy it no matter what.