Here’s an interesting statistic on the possibly most controversial mount of all time. The Reins of the Trader’s Gilded Brutosaur caused quite the stir with its $90 store price and its vendors outdoing the original 
Reins of the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur by adding a mailbox. However, we instantly saw many of them around Dornogal and many more players complaining about it. So, in the end, how many did end up being sold?
Data for Azeroth’s Numbers
Emerno took a look at Data for Azeroth’s stats on the mount, comparing it to the original Brutosaur owners. Now, do keep in mind, Data for Azeroth does not have stats on all WoW players, but rather a smaller subset. They do try to get as many characters in as they can, but they rely on poking Blizzard’s API and finding characters through the Hall of Fame, Mythic+, PvP leaderboards and similar sources. Players can also turn their characters private, so those will not be covered. However, it is a pretty solid average of the WoW community in general, especially the higher end players that spend more time in the game.
The Brutal Amounts
As Emerno gathered, it seems the new Gilded Brutosaur is more prevalent than the old one!
5.3% of players tracked by DfA own the new Brutosaur, 1.2% more than the old one. That actually makes a lot of sense when you dive into it. The new mount is not only available directly for cash, making it a lot more accessible. And it’s also a lot cheaper. The original cost 5 million gold, while the new one costs the equivalent of 1.5-2 million, depending on the region’s WoW token price.
When you take into account the WoW token prices back during Battle for Azeroth, that would make the old bruto cost almost $600 if you didn’t have the gold! A lot of players did have the gold, of course, from various earlier expansion methods (Warlords of Draenor’s Garrison mission alt spam comes to mind). The player population is also most likely higher at the moment than it was during the old bruto. However, the old one was available for a much longer time.
Actual Money Earned
So what does all this add up to? Barkansas19 took Emerno‘s numbers and gave it a guess. However, they did not list what they based the player numbers on. And so, we did a little calculation of our own inspired by their post.
For the players that bought the mount with gold, it actually becomes more valuable to Blizzard. Each WoW token bought gives you $15 in Blizzard balance. Meanwhile, it cost $20 for the player that sold it to you. So while you spend $90 in 6 gold-bought tokens, that comes out to $120 for Blizzard from the players that sold those tokens to you.
Now, obviously we don’t know what the subscriber numbers are for WoW, as Blizzard haven’t shared them since Legion. There have been several solid guesses based on various factors, from Dragonflight’s estimated 7.25 Million to the more recent estimates for The War Within and Classic which claim the player numbers are higher than they’ve ever been.
So if we take the 5.3% as accurate, we’d still need the actual player/subscriber count to get to some real numbers. But even with a solidly conservative guess of 5 million (considering it may be as high as 10 or even more), that comes out to 265,000 players owning the mount. If we take the base price of the mount only, not counting the WoW token factor, that comes out to $23.85 million. Considering the mount “only” cost 1.5-2 million gold it seems likely quite a few players got it via the token, which also means the final dollar number was considerably higher than the 23.8 million above.
More to Come?
No matter what the exact number, it’s safe to say that Blizzard did really well with this particular mount. Whether it’s $23 million or more remains up for debate, but with numbers like that it seems we might be getting more mounts like it in the future. What do you think of even more utility and quality of life features being added to store mounts?
