Seattle-based real estate company Zillow has partnered with the company behind the long-running online game World of Warcraft in order to showcase players’ creativity by exhibiting their virtual homes.
A new microsite, “Zillow for Warcraft,” allows users to explore an assortment of designs for in-game housing, both those made by players and by members of WoW’s development team. Some of these homes will be presented using the same methods as Zillow’s real-world virtual tours, such as with 3D modeling and SkyTour visuals, so users can poke around a fantasy kitchen just as if it was real.
World of Warcraft, published and developed by Microsoft subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment, recently unveiled player housing as a feature of its newest paid expansion, Midnight. Owners of the expansion can opt to take their characters to an in-game island, where they’re given a plot of land and a small house to customize and decorate however they wish.
(Midnight also involves a life-and-death struggle against a shadow-wielding antagonist who plans to seize and corrupt the very heart of the game’s world, but in much of its marketing so far, Blizzard has chosen to emphasize the new home-building feature. Go figure.)
“Player housing is a milestone moment for the World of Warcraft community, and we wanted to honor it in a way that felt authentic and unexpected,” Beverly W. Jackson, vice president of brand and product marketing at Zillow, said in a press release.
Jackson continued: “Zillow exists at the center of how people think and talk about home, and gaming has become another powerful expression of that. This collaboration brings two worlds together, celebrating home as both a place to belong and a place to escape into something that feels honest and personal.”
As part of the Zillow collaboration, WoW players will be able to unlock a number of decorative items for their in-game homes, such as a unique doormat.
Notably, Zillow for Warcraft features no transactions at all. You will not be able to exchange real or virtual money for anything seen on the website. It’s simply a free virtual tour of what players have been able to accomplish with WoW’s new housing system.
The deal with Zillow is one of several bizarre new brand deals that Blizzard has made for Midnight, including a collaboration with Pinterest that can unlock an in-game camera. While the primary driver of World of Warcraft is still widespread armed conflict in an increasingly vast fantasy universe, the introduction of housing seems to have spurred Blizzard into also pitching it to a new audience as a cozy house-building simulator. It’s simply that to get new furniture, you occasionally may have to go to another dimension and beat it out of a dragon.
World of Warcraft celebrated its 21st anniversary in November. Midnight, its 11th expansion, is planned to go live on March 2.
