Use or Sell WoW:BC-CE?

January 16, 2007 10:10 AM

Should I use my copy of Burning Crusade Collector's Edition or sell it? If I sell it, should I sell now or wait?

I don't really know if copies of the Collector's Edition are in short supply so I'm not sure how much the price will go up over time. Are they going to make more and meet demand? Also, I'm not sure if I'm entirely comfortable selling it at a markup. During the whole PS3 and Wii release hubbub it seemed like a lot of people driving the hype were just buying to turn around and immediately resell on ebay and that kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.

I play a little, but not that much. I have one 60 Troll Shaman that took me maybe a year. If I was crazy into the game I'd use it, no question.

posted by ODiV to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Put it on eBay with a starting price of $100 (or whatever it actually cost) and see how much the price moves up.
posted by chunking express at 10:14 AM on January 16, 2007

According to the hullabaloo, CE copies account for 10% of the shipped regular copies. Blizzard is the only company (that I've seen) that can make a CE worth purchasing. Copies of the original title sold a year later on eBay went for approximately 500.00 a pop.
posted by thanotopsis at 10:15 AM on January 16, 2007

Hold onto it, sealed, and check the prices periodically. You can always buy a regular copy and use that.

Worst case is that it never fetches a premium and you are stuck with it forever.
posted by Diskeater at 10:44 AM on January 16, 2007

Sell it. That's what I'm doing with my two (soon to be three) copies.

If you want to look at the art book or see the Making Of DVD, someone will Torrent them. The card game stuff you could buy separately. The pet is just a pet.

Average the selling prices of the last fifty BuyItNows purchased by users and from users each with feedback greater than 0 (or some other reasonable threshold).

Run a three-day auction with that average as the starting bid, and with a BuyItNow equal to 80% of the highest BuyItNow in your sample size.

My guesstimate is that it'll work out to $189 with a BIN of $229 or thereabouts.

And sell it now. There are a lot more Burning Crusade CEs out there than there are WoW CEs. And you should not feel bad at all making a profit on it. If you don't, the odds are that someone else will. Were someone to offer to sell me another CE at retail, I'd buy that one, too, just to resell.
posted by solid-one-love at 12:59 PM on January 16, 2007

So is the general consensus that there are enough copies for those who want them available and demand will die down? Or is it the opposite and as copies are opened, sealed ones will be worth more down the line?

Such a tough decision. I think I will end up selling it. Now I just need to decide when. I guess if I can offload it for around CAD$200 then I'm doing really well (pretty much double what I paid). I'll see if I can sell locally first maybe and then try ebay (which looks like a pain, and I'd rather not deal with paypal if I can avoid it).

Thanks for the help so far and I would appreciate any more info/advice.
posted by ODiV at 1:56 PM on January 16, 2007

In the States, it's damn near impossible to get a copy of the CE if you didn't pre-order it. However, in Canada, I've heard of a few stores that actually have a few extra copies laying around. You'll probably have a lot more luck selling it on e-bay, and yes, there people who want it that badly with the short supply.
posted by jmd82 at 2:22 PM on January 16, 2007

I'm in Australia, and my husband just went to pick up his regular pre-ordered copy today. He says that the guy at the games shop was telling him that some woman called up today and offered, like, AUD $800 for the collector's edition. Apparently very few of them were allocated here. So if you auction it off, make sure you make it available to people Down Under!
posted by web-goddess at 4:17 PM on January 16, 2007

If you choose to eBay it, do it straight away. Everyone playing WoW will want to upgrade to Burning Crusade immediately. If they can't find a CE within a couple of days, they will buy a standard edition and the CE's code and in-game pet will be useless to them.

By the time the shops close this weekend, anyone who cares enough about WoW to be interested in the CE will have upgraded to BC so they can keep up with their guild -- particularly if they're MT.
posted by krisjohn at 4:34 PM on January 16, 2007

I just used my copy. It's a nice package with some good art and a cute vanity pet, but there's nothing in there that would make me excited to pay $100+ for it. Yes, it's hard to buy a CE edition now. But if 10% of shipped copies were CE, that's a lot of copies out there.
posted by Nelson at 7:12 PM on January 16, 2007

People are actually bothered about the CE? Sheesh, I'm too busy actually playing my bog standard copy to care about the extras. I think one person in my guild of 50+ people bought it. So if you're going to sell it, sell it now. If I were you I wouldn't waste the time, I'd delve back into the content to see what's going on. The atmosphere on my realm is fantastic right now (and the main cities outside of Outlands are ghost towns, which is just so bizarre).
posted by saturnine at 5:13 AM on January 17, 2007

Looks like I was wrong. Copies are selling on EBay for an average of about $100, and a lot of copies are going unsold. I should have no problem selling any of my copies for a fraction above retail, but nobody's gonna make a fortune on these.
posted by solid-one-love at 2:11 PM on January 17, 2007