Not opening it is another Burning Crusade
Earlier today I was at CompUSA looking for a cable I needed. I didn’t find the cable there, but I did find something else. I found one remaining copy of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Collector’s Edition. It didn’t have a price tag on it, so I brought it up to the front, and it rang up for $70! I told the guy I wasn’t interested in buying it because it was so expensive, then he came back with a rejoinder that I didn’t expect to hear and that I wished I heard a lot more often.
“How much are you willing to pay?” I responded $50, and he accepted, and I bought it. In hindsight, I probably should have said $40 or so, but whatever. Now you may be wondering why I bought the expansion when I stopped playing the game a year and a half ago and have no intentions of relapsing. It’s simple: economics! The collector’s edition of the original game is currently selling for $400-500 on eBay. The Burning Crusade collector’s edition is currently flooding the market on eBay and is only going for about $80-90 right now, but, in a year or two, it is going to be considerably higher. The collector’s editions are released in limited numbers, and with each day that passes, more and more of them are being opened and installed, and thus, their precious goodies are being locked into accounts. WoW is an addicts’ game, and the collectors’ editions come with special in-game stuff that cannot be obtained through any other means. It doesn’t seem so absurd spending $500 for some limited edition stuff if one is playing the game for over four hours each day, as many people are.
So I’ll just hold onto this collector’s edition for awhile and sell it at a few hundred percent markup. As investments go, this one is fairly low-risk. World of Warcraft is by far the largest MMORPG out there with over eight million subscribers, and it simply isn’t going to just vanish in a year or two. This collector’s edition will thus at the very least maintain its present value. Sometimes I wonder if investing in collectibles could be a viable fund strategy. Rather than buying common stocks of companies, why not buy up Black Lotuses and their ilk, limited editions, and collector’s editions? It could theoretically work. There’s enough collectible crap out there, between the miniatures games and the trading card games to support at least a decent-sized portfolio.
