duskjome Currency conversion on all Blizzard shops is coming, it’s practically here! Too early to reference the Grinch? Fair enough. So yeah, big pluses for Canadians, New Zealanders and Japanese people, soon you’ll know what you’re about to pay for your lootboxes, Blizzard expansions and other assorted items on the fancy new shop tab on your battle.net app. In fact it should go live circa today, November 16th in the year of our King of Town 2017.
A few points of order, World of Warcraft subscriptions will continue to charge in whatever the USD conversion is until you either update your payment information or stop and reorder the service. Also, for at least a while, you may not have access to your Blizzard Balance (I’m sure they’ll get around to changing the branding on that back to “Battle.net” soon, also). It is also scheduled to be converted over to your local currency, theoretically also on Nov 16th.
That all seems reasonable, especially considering there have been no firm word from Blizzard vis a vis the price changes. Based on data from Google Play (for Hearthstone, for those of you who don’t play anything and everything Blizzard makes) it does seem like their will be a price increase of some sort. So yes, my fellow Canadians, gone are our dreams of paying a flat 15 bucks a month for WoW. And it sounds like they are erring on the side of charging a little more than the usual going rate or exchange. So where now you are likely paying something like 18 or 19 per month for a WoW subscription in Canada you can probably expect to pay 20.
But this is all extrapolation from limited information and I’m sure Blizzard will update us with something official likely before the end of day. Personally I’m pro the change but I know it has some cons. It will be great to know, at a glance, that I’m about to burn 30 dollars on Overwatch Loot Boxes in December when I should be buying Christmas presents instead of the 20 that I think I’m burning. But, as we in Canada know only too well, when the exchange rate changes how slow will Blizz be with changing the prices accordingly?. With legal recreational weed almost a forgone conclusion in Canada and Trump being Trump in the American White House it is very likely the Canadian dollar will jump a lot in the coming months and year. Will we still be paying 20 dollars a month for WoW when the exchange rate is much closer to 1 to 1? Or will good guy Blizz step in and alter prices again as things chance internationally? Stay tuned to find out!
