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Let me whisk you back to a different time in gaming—a time when we, in our innocence, would mock the idea that making people real-world money to unlock some gaudy-looking horse armour is a business practice that would catch on.
It was the year of Akatosh, 433 (aka April 2006), when the now-infamous Horse Armor Pack for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion was released upon the world. Oh how we laughed. $2.50 for a pair of crappy horse armours (and that gold one looked really crappy—like a child had just swallowed a yellow highlighter pen then vomited it up over the horse’s back)? Who did Bethesda take us for?
Of course, the joke would turn out to be on us, as the Horse Armor Pack is now widely regarded as Ground Zero for in-game microtransactions. And while we’ve been living all these years in a kind of daze where we’ve come to accept the idea of paying real-world money for virtual clothing as a norm, it feels like the pricing of Diablo 4’s horse armor really punctuates that, for all the scorn it suffered, Oblivion’s Horse Armor Pack was right all along: people will pay increasingly silly amounts of money for silly things.
In this case, Diablo 4’s various horse armours are split into three or four items that come in a bundle, so the armour itself, and a couple of trophies usually, with the price amounting to Blizzard’s premium currency equivalent of between $8 and $15. Sure, you're technically getting a few items in each bundle, but a) you don't have the option to buy the bits individually and b) they're all just horse armour broken down into different pieces, and clearly designed to go together as a set, so let's not kid ourselves here. If one day Blizzard starts breaking down horse armour into horse helmets, saddles, butt armour, flank armour, and individual hoof boots, then don't let them fool you into thinking you're somehow getting better value here just because they're giving you 10 things.
For perspective, Oblivion’s Horse Armor Pack (consisting of two armours) amounts to $3.76 when adjusted for today’s inflation, so that’s just $1.88 per armour. Bargain! It’s wild to think that at the time this was seen as such bad value that Todd Howard came out to address the horse armour fiasco years later, and actually pinned the blame for its pricing on Microsoft, claiming that he wanted to price it lower than $2.50 but Microsoft insisted otherwise.
It’s ironic that through the lens of 2007 (and for years after that considering the Horse Armor Pack basically turned into a meme mocking the absurdity of microtransactions), the Horse Armor Pack looks like a ridiculous waste of money, but from a 2023 perspective it’s actually very good value for in-game cosmetics (you can still buy the Horse Armor Pack today funnily enough, so what are you waiting for?).
All this is a nice counterpoint to my recent look at game prices in the 90s, when I suggested that the recent price hikes of triple-A games to $70 still doesn’t compare to what games used to cost back in the day. Back then however, we didn’t have microtransactions to contend with, which don’t really affect single-player games, but can realistically bring the price of a game like Diablo 4 up to hundreds of dollars.
Then again, it’s all optional content, as Diablo 4 doesn’t lock any content or features off behind paywalls, so if you want to splash the cash on some horse armour, then who am I to care or judge? As someone who almost never spends money on cosmetics—other than occasionally buying a Hunt: Showdown skin to show my support for a game that cost me $20 and I’ve spent hundreds of hours in)---I should probably be thanking those cosmetic big-spenders who ultimately help finance the game to run over the long run.
Whatever way you look at it, the tables have turned since 2007, as the legacy of Oblivion’s Horse Armor Pack comes full circle and we arrive at a time where people by the thousands will be paying for horse armour in Diablo 4 that costs several times more than that. On the other hand, I’m yet to find a horse armour in Diablo 4 that looks so impressively awful as the sickly-swishy Elven horse armour of Oblivion.
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