Guardian Cub hits World of Warcraft auction houses

I've previously written about the new Guardian Cub vanity pet for World of Warcraft.
My initial post detailed how this pet will allow you to indirectly buy WoW gold for real cash, while my follow up post focused on Blizzards justification for this move.

Does this look like a 10k gold pieces pet to you?

Now the Guardian Cub has been released into the wild and has made its way onto the auction houses of WoW servers everywhere, giving you a chance to lay down some Blizzard coin for a pet bought with Real Coins (tm).

Of course, the really interesting question is, how much are these pets selling for?
What is the price of a Blizzard sanctioned gold buying service?

It's still early days and, as with any new item introduced in the Azerothian economy, it will take some time before buyers and sellers find each other and the prices stabilize.
On the low end it seems that some of these dragon puppies go for as low as 6.000 gold, with conversely insane highs of upwards of 40.000 gold.
It seems that the average price is already slowly converging to a point around 12.000-15.000 gold pieces, meaning that you're getting around 1.200 to 1.500 gold per dollar.

If we try to compare this to the more shady gold buying sites that is the alternative to buying a Guardian Cub, then a quick Google check indicates that the average gold price is around 900-1.100 gold per dollar.
So right now you can actually get Blizzard sanctioned gold cheaper than it would be to use the non-sanctioned gold selling sites!

Of course, there is a real possibility that the price of the Guardian Cub is going to slide as time goes by and demand drops off. Because the supply is only dictated by peoples wallets and not any in-game mechanics, there is a real risk of over saturation of the market, which will drive prices down hard.

It's going to be interesting to follow the price development of the Guardian Cub and see, if it continues to be better value for money than going to 3rd party sites. And if the price stays high, will we see more aggressive pricing from the 3rd party gold sellers to lure customers away from Blizzard?



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