With less than a week to go before its Jan. 16 release, pre-orders for the limited edition collector's edition of World of Warcraft's Burning Crusade expansion are fetching prices as high as $400 on auction sites like eBay. While careful eBay buyers can get the game for as low as $110, ending prices on the site averaged just over $200, or just under three times the $69.99 retail price. For those who want to forgo the auction route, there's always the Amazon.com resellers, starting at $250.
The collector's edition includes lots of extra goodies, including an exclusive mount pet [update: couldn't keep my world of Warcraft creatures straight], making it a highly sought after prestige piece for many of World of Warcraft's 7.5 million subscribers. Blizzard has said the collectors edition will not be reprinted after the initial allotment, which has been sold out in pre-order for months.
The original World of Warcraft Collector's Edition still fetches auction prices hovering around $300 on eBay over two years after its extremely limited release. Will the Burning Crusade frenzy similarly endure, or will we see a console-style bottoming out of the auction market once the game is actually in stores?
