You Can Now (Effectively) Make Hearthstone Or Heroes of the Storm Purchases With WoW Gold

Blizzard has offered WoW Tokens for some time now. You can purchase one with real money and sell it for gold in World of Warcraft's auction house, or use your in-game gold to buy one from the auction house and get a month's worth of subscription time for "free."

Today, Blizzard announced additional functionality for the WoW token, allowing you to convert one to $15 USD worth of Battle.net balance, which can then be applied to any Blizzard game. The gold cost of a WoW Token varies over time based on supply and demand -- it was over 64,000 gold when we checked just as this article was being written -- but if you've got the time to grind out thousands of gold, it's a viable alternative to paying. You might also consider it if you're ready to move on to WoW and want to "cash out" into another Blizzard game. Blizzard sells the tokens for $20 on its shop, so it's an obviously meant to facilitate legal "gold purchases" and undercut illicit gold sellers, not replace traditional monthly subscriptions.

So if you've got a lot of WoW gold and want to buy some packs in Hearthstone or goodies in Heroes of the Storm -- or Overwatch or Starcraft II or Diablo 3 -- the new and improved WoW Token might be a way to go. It sure beats making purchases via a site like CheapWoWGoldAndWeTotallyWontStealYourCreditCardInfo.com.