A treehouse bundle in WoW costs a whopping $75, and while I know exactly who Blizzard’s made it for, that doesn’t mean I feel good about it

World of Warcraft’s player housing feature is great—the microtransactions involved? Not so much. To be clear: There’s a huge list of decor you can get in the game without paying anything other than your usual subscription, and the system has enough freedom that you can absolutely build your own treehouse, if you wanted.

But it still doesn’t smack of great optics when Blizzard trots out housing packages like the Cosy Treehouse Retreat bundle, which costs a whopping $75 in Hearthsteel. Yikes.

That is, for context, more than $25 more expensive than the Midnight expansion itself, and $5 more than the Heroic Edition. Now, the bundle itself does have some cool stuff in it—two treehouse variants and a bunch of secondary decor items, and you can grab just the treehouses themselves for $40—but still. Yikes.

That’s not to say nobody’s going to buy these. Back in January of last year, it was estimated that a $90 dinosaur mount raked in a cool $15 million for Blizzard. Developers don’t just put packs like these out for no reason at all, and I’ve no doubt that the Cosy Treehouse Retreat will be seen as a very nice uptick on Blizzard’s balance sheets.

However, it’s pretty clear that this pack really is just oriented towards “whales”, a somewhat derogatory term (nonetheless applicable here) used to describe the small section of any game’s playerbase with deep enough pockets to be just fine dropping a cool $75 on whatever they’d like.

Your average player with a normal salary and bills to pay, even if they are very invested in Player Housing, isn’t going to be taken by any of the offers Blizzard’s putting out, here—the people actually using this system would likely go in for cheap, affordable kits full of miscellaneous items that’d help construct what they’re actually making. Like a Star Destroyer.

That’s not really a thing on the Player Housing store. The closest thing is this $35 starting decor pack, which gets you… uh, two gazebos and $25 of Hearthsteel, which you could use to buy a handful of items, I guess.

I think it’s ostensibly whatever for Blizzard to be offering microtransactions for player housing—it’s still adding decor items that’re available through play, and if it wants to charge for prefabs designed for players who aren’t artistically gifted enough to cobble sculptures together out of a dozen rugs, fine.

But it does dim my opinion of the entire feature to see the store so cynically angled towards the portion of the playerbase they can milk for dosh, rather than the humble proletariat that might be actually invested in the system they’re making this stuff for. As one player on the game’s subreddit puts it: “You can buy real trees for less.”