Warhammer EU Pricing - Fustercluck

There really does seem to be a lot of confusion regarding the pricing of Warhammer Online. You'll remember that a couple of weeks back the EU prices were announced, and we called them into question, noticing they were simply conversions of Euro into Pound, not only very odd numbers, but numbers well above the competition. We nagged at the UK PR, Indigo Pearl, and they eventually came back to us with new prices in line with what we'd expect. Well, madly, it doesn't end there.

The set-up for WAR is messy. Mythic, who previously created long-running MMO Dark Age Of Camelot, had a relationship with French company GOA to host their games in Europe. That was confusing enough, published by a mixture of KOCH, Wanadoo and GOA. The same plans were in place for the early days of WAR, with GOA set up to handle the European market. And then EA arrived, bags of money in both hands, and bought Mythic. But with deals already done with GOA, the result appears to be (and good grief, we have no clue for certain) that EA are handling N. American territories, with GOA taking care of Europe, and the communications between the two seeming muddled. Now it seems there's a breakdown within just the one territory.

This brings us to a forum post from yesterday by GOA's Magnus Kjellström, the new Community Manager for Europe. He says,

Rumours about UK price cut
This is a big one, naturally. As far as I know, these rumours origin from a blogger (forgot which) who called EA to ask about the UK prices, only to be told that they were lower than those announced in our Press Release last week.

As of now, the information we have at hand is those stated in named PR document. If there are any changes to the UK pricing, we will announce this. I've made enquiries about the truth behind these rumours, but I'm afraid I have nothing solid to go on so far.

This is peculiar news to us, as we were told by GOA's PR representatives, Indigo Pearl (because it wasn't complicated enough for them without introducing a 43rd company), the following:

"Please see below for the updated subs prices for WAR :

£8.99 per month

£25.17 for 3 months

£46.14 for 6 months

They could well be ameding the box price too but I will let you know."

To double-stress, this announcement was preceeded by an Indigo Pearl email telling us,

"I've spoken to GOA about the prices and they're going to review them for the UK and let me know Monday."

Which would seem to imply that someone at GOA had said something, but apparently not told the GOA communications manager. Which wouldn't seem a great plan. Perhaps there is a specific confusion between European and UK pricing, and that this distinction either isn't understood by all, or simply doesn't exist.

The moral of this story? Don't be successful? I dunno. But flipping crikey, it seems WAR needs some sort of UN body to manage the various factions, allowing them to communicate with each other, before the game gets exclusively released for N64 in Mongolia. We have, of course, enquired to find out what on Earth is going on.