Sparkle Pony vs the Sparkle Cat

I'm writing this post partly after listing to MMOVoices podcast #34, and partly because of some of the other things I have read during the last week regarding SOE introducing the sparkle cat in EQ2 (kinda weird for me to defend SOE on this). Lots has been said that this is just SOE copying Blizzard with a 25$ mount, but I think people are not looking at it from the right angle, it really comes down to Blizzard copying SOE.

Why do I say that, well lets look back at RMT in both games. SOE introduced its Marketplace back on December 9, 2008 when it started they had a few items with the most expensive being 10$ for a set of appearance armor, time goes by they slowly add things to the marketplace including change name and change gender potions witch they sell for 25$ (which the reveal at FanFaire 2009 is there biggest seller), more time passes they add race change potion 25$ and character transfer also 25$, on December 22, 2009 they started selling backpacks for 25$, these are 44 slot backpacks tha would actually have an appearance on your character. Also during this time they have been creating lots of house items for people to buy, to the annoyance of the carpenters in EQ2, and they sell complete sets for 50$, yep thats right 50$.

Now we have Blizzard, on November 4, 2009 Blizzard announced it was selling 2 pets for 10$ each. Granted until Dec 31, 2009 50% of the Pandaren monk pet was going to the Make a wish Foundation (SOE also had a similar thing with donations going to Child's Play for the 2nd year). Now April 16, 2010 they now offer a new pet for 10$ and gasp a sparkle pony for 25$. That's 4 items that are offered in to WOW store (yes some of you may say what about the 2 stuffed pets you can buy that give you digital pets in game, and I say if your getting something thats real, its not the same thing)

Now comes May 20, 2010 and SOE anounces its sparkle cat for gasp 25$, now I will say here I think the sparkle pony in WoW is a better deal, I believe that SOE just had the bad luck of releasing this after Blizzard.

As for the price point being the same, well looking at the stuff that SOE has released, I'm surprised it wasn't more, and maybe we should be glad for Blizzard for releasing their mount first so that it wasn't.

So who is really copying who, well I think that's just what MMO's do.

RGX