- For those willing to brave the stores, WoW's Pandaria expansion will be 50% off. Blizzard does not feel obliged to offer a similar discount online, so presumably this is in part to help retailers move their boxes. Not sure if this is technically a sign of weakness, as WoW's last two expansions were not timed right to be discounted on Black Friday, and digital sales are almost certainly a bigger piece of the pie this year.
- As is traditional, Turbine is offering deep discounts on expansions, including 50% off of the six week old Rohan expansion in LOTRO and 75% off of this summer's DDO expansions.
Both products bundled various extras that may or may not be of interest to players in order to justify higher price tags ($50 for the cheapest DDO bundle that includes the new class, $70 for LOTRO's legendary bundle, which was the only way to get the sixth inventory bag until recently). Both become attractive upsells when the price is slashed 50%. In LOTRO, the $40 base edition comes with the content and 1000 Turbine Points, while the $70 edition comes with the sixth bag (which costs 995 TP itself and is specifically excluded from this week's sale on inventory upgrades), an extra 1000 TP (for a total of 2000), and some various cosmetic miscellany. At half off, you're getting those extras for $15 and still paying less than the full price on the base edition.
Various other MMO's have launched expansions probably too recently to offer deep discounts - both Rift and EQ2 rolled out last week. I don't expect major discounts on Guild Wars 2 because they don't have a subscription fee that would motivate them to dump boxes (though Amazon is currently offering it for $45). However, we could see some cash store sales in various games that don't have a dirt cheap expansion on offer. If you know of anything interesting, leave a comment and I'll add it to this post assuming I'm not in a turkey coma or fighting for my life in stores at the time. :)
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!