The Pandaren Monk is an exclusive in-game pet for Blizzard’s popular World of Warcraft. The Pandaren Monk was made available on November 4th 2009 and retailed for $10. Blizzard stated that from November to December, for every Pandaren Monk sold they would donate half of the proceeds to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
On February 16th Blizzard reported that they donated over $1.1 million to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. As a current WoW player and owner of a Pandaren Monk, I am proud that the community managed to raise that much money to help those in need.
To find out more about this donation go here.
Seems rather bogus as a ‘charitable’ thing. I mean if your selling a real product and if you start donating part of it’s normal sale price to charity, your certainly being charitable and sacrificing something.
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Here they flip over a bit in memory somewhere and send five bucks to the charity. Blizzard is sacrificing nothing and for some reason gaining media attention for this. Indeed they are making more of a profit rather than giving to charity.
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I mean, to paraphrase Tobold, hand me $10 and I promise to give $5 to charity. Is that any noble act on my behalf?
Blizzard seems to really like Make-a-Wish, the in-game pheonix mount was first made for a child that went to blizzard through the foundation I believe. Good on them.
Callan- You do have a point. But what number would be appropiote? 50%, 75%? As you poionted out when its 99.9% profit, the number is hard to pin down. Maybe 100% of the $10 for the first 6 months it was out? Either way though its still 1.1 million Dollars that made its way to charity. Not exactly a bad thing, especially considering in the entire year of 2009 Child’s Play brought in $1.7 million, which is no small feat in and of itself.
I think I’d agree with your 100% for the first six months, or 100% for the first 10,000 sold (or whatever number). And after that they take all the money from it, so as not to confuse the issue.
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That or don’t even advertise that your donating the money. I mean, if the charity getting money is the most important thing, why advertise it?
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Mind you, a very mercenary part of me inside is thinking how much people accepted this and thinking how much I could gain publicity/ad worthy traffic by somehow flipping bits myself/giving absolutely nothing.
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Part of me thinks, if people can’t hear it when their told this isn’t generosity, it’s money making, why shouldn’t I take that up as well?