Ladies and Gentlemen – let the holiday shopping season…..begin! It’s post turkey day in America today, which can only mean one thing: Black Friday. Traditionally, Black Friday is the kick off to the massive holiday shopping spree that most retailers depend on to bring the revenues home. Perhaps even more so this year. But that’s not to say that the virtual world is free from any mass marketed consumerism.
While there’s a number of virtual goods price drops headed our way today, the biggest fish in the sea, Zynga is offering virtual world players some serious Black Friday offerings.
Starting out with their biggest bread winner, Zynga’s Mafia Wars will be offering discounts on some of it’s most in demand items. Starting today, and running the entire weekend (including Monday until midnight PST), Zynga will be running promos and deep discounts on “Limited Edition and consumable items.” To up the ante (and sales figures), users can track how many items they’ve purchased on a “mastery bar”. Once said users acquires a minimum of 20 items, they’ll received a special gift “über” gift.
But wait…there’s more. Mafia Wars will also be offering an hourly featured item (blue light special) that’s reported to be insanely cheap. The Black Friday promotion is tied to the already running Thanksgiving Fight promo, in which both mobs have the chance of dropping Thanksgiving themed items.
If Mafioso aren’t your thing, fear not, Zynga’s serving up other tasty Black Friday treats. Their 15.5 million monthly users Roller Coaster Kingdom will also feature a number of promos. The concept of Roller Coaster Kingdom is simple – build a world class amusement park. Not always something accomplished on the cheap. Therefore, Zynga is offering steep 25% discounts across the board. I.e. not only are they offering a 25% discount on in-game coin purchases, but also those of RMT’s.
These discounts are great for fans of the game, but they also bring up an interesting case of controlling a virtual world economy. If said ‘desireable’ objects in Mafia Wars are suddenly common (due to the large number of purchases of these items), do they still retain their desirability – and associated price point? On the other side of the coin, this might be a good way for Zynga to unload a large amount of virtual content, preparing the way for newer, rarer, and therefore more expensive items to be released into the game in the near future? Say….around Christmas? We’ll have to wait and see – but my money’s riding on new, rare content soon.
