Blizzard is continuing to experiment with the economics of its online game ecosystem, announcing this week that World of Warcraft players can now convert their in-game gold into Battle.net credit they can spend in other Blizzard games.
This is a notable step beyond the “WoW Tokens” that Blizzard introduced into the game last year as a currency players could buy with in-game gold (or real money) and spend for more game time, much like the “Plex” currency CCP Games maintains in its free-to-play space MMORPG EVE Online.
By taking this step Blizzard has opened up some intriguing new economic possibilities in its ecosystem, since Battle.net credit can be spent on everything from Hearthstone or Overwatch in-game items to actual Blizzard games.
However, there are some limits — players can’t directly convert the credit into cash, and if they don’t use a Blizzard authenticator on their account they’ll have a limit placed on their maximum credit balance.