Blizzard has explained its decision to include a $60 in-app purchase in upcoming World of Warcraft expansion Warlords of Draenor.
The expansion increases the World of Warcraft level cap to 100 and gives players the option to instantly increase one player's level to 90. However, should players wish to increase further characters to level 90 they'll have two options: either grind and level up as before, or buy another level 90 boost for $60.
Blizzard lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas told Eurogamer: "We realised as soon as we came out with the Warlords Of Draenor boost to 90, we knew that there was going to be demand for more than one.
"It's tremendously awkward to tell someone that you should buy two copies of the expansion just to get a second 90. That's odd. So we knew at that point we were going to have to offer it as a separate service.
"In terms of the pricing, honestly a big part of that is not wanting to devalue the accomplishment of levelling," Hazzikostas claimed. "If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that: make it $10 or something. And then hardly anyone would ever level a character again.
"But levelling is something that takes dozens if not over 100 hours in many cases and people have put serious time and effort into that, and we don't want to diminish that."
Warlords of Draenor will explore the franchise's history across the new continent of Draenor. It will also introduce visual upgrades that increase the polygon counts of some player models more than fivefold.