Way too expensive - and either way, you can probably get it for free just like the previous 2-3 years before.
I am not worried.
I think the tickets are rather expensive, but it's worth it imo. There's so much to see on the stream and I like the goodies.
Sadly, I have 2 birthdays I need to attend on Saterday and I live in Europe... Not sure if I'd buy a ticket or spend my gaming allowance this month on pokemon xP
Yes. It is way too expensive. Paying $40 for a live stream of a convention is ridiculous. Especially if you aren't interested in all the Blizzard IP's. All you get ingame is a stupid pet or other meaningless cosmetic stuff for other Blizzard games which you may or may not own, let alone play. The WoW expansion itself will cost as much as this virtual ticket, that just shows how overpriced it is. And it's pretty dumb imho. To be honest, I'd be willing to fork out maybe 10 euro max to watch it without hassle, as usually there are enough people who restream it for free anyway. In my case, I'm only really interested in the WoW panels, so even paying 10 euros for that is being generous in my eyes. By making the barrier so high with such a stupid cost, you're basically pigeonholing everyone who isn't interested in mediocre cosmetic items into pirate streams while they maybe would've been willing to pay if the price had been reasonable.
Long story short: I'm still gonna see what I would've been able to see with a virtual ticket, except I won't pay a single cent for it when I would've been prepared to if the price was reasonable. All I lose out on is a pet, which I really don't care about anyway, and some cosmetic stuff for other Blizzard games which I basically play once for the story and then ignore completely.
40$ usd for a bunch of news youll get a few minutes / hours laters anyways? seems kind of a dumb thing to do
Depends on the person. I play all of Blizzard's games so ~20+ hours of content for $40 is good for me. But I can understand how it can be expensive for people who only like one game for example.
Then why don't they add those things to the Blizzard Virtual Store instead of overpricing their stream for them when not everyone even wants them? That way the people who just want the cosmetic stuff can get it, and the people who just care about the stream can get a more reasonable offer perhaps. Or why not sell packages? People who are only interested in WoW can buy a WoW ticket for example, which includes the murloc and coverage of WoW panels only.
Compared to a cinemas where you pay £6 for a 2 hour film it's really not as bad as people make it out to be.
You're paying for the experience in a world where there is only a finite amount of physical tickets, so there is a premium for that. personally, the production quality of the stream is pretty good with the commentators and such with interviews between panels. If you don't care to see more than the opening ceremony, then most of the info about the expansion will be listed on mmoc within a few hours after announcement.
I seriously doubt everyone who bought a ticket/virtual ticket is 100% interested in all their franchises. What I tend to see is that you have players that are really passionate about one of the franchises, be it WoW, Starcraft or Diablo, and due to their huge interest in that franchise the other ones become sideshows for them due to time constraints. Of course for the people who like all their franchises, it's even more awesome of an event. I also own SC2 and D3 besides WoW and played them a bit, but I don't really care too much about them that I would want to stay 100% up to date on them and get all the news directly from the devs mouths. With WoW I do care about it though, since I enjoy it a lot more.
With the convention itself of course it makes little sense to split it up in parts respective to their IPs, due to physical limitations such as space. But for a virtual stream you can easily split it up and therefore lower the price by quite a lot if people only want a specific part. This thread is about the virtual ticket after all, not the physical one.
As I mentioned before, I'm still going to see live what I want to see. But Blizzard isn't getting anything for it. It's a missed opportunity for them.
Can you actually re-watch the stream at a later time?