Blizzard has partnered with real estate website Zillow to create Zillow for Warcraft, a goofy Zillow-like website intended to promote the game’s new player housing feature with humor, information, and a free in-game item.
The website, accessible at zillowforwarcraft.com or zillow.com/warcraft, is, to be clear, a goof. At the moment, it doesn’t seem to be showing off actual houses built by real players. It instead has a curated selection of both Horde and Alliance homes that seem to be intended more to offer inspiration to players working on their own homes than anything. Besides, it’s not like you can actually buy someone else’s fully built and decorated house in the game, anyway.
The website is cute, though. It’s got a handful of different housing options on different plots in both the Horde and Alliance neighborhoods to skim through, with humorous descriptions of decor decisions and, frankly, some pretty good ideas that I hadn’t really thought of for my own rustic shack. You’re guided through the website by Bek’tar Donhammar and Hazyl Fizzlehorn, two fictional Azerothian real estate agents who each have their own profiles with “reviews” from satisfied customers, all rife with in-jokes.
The main reason you might care to visit the website, though, is to get the free item. If you link your battle.net account, you can get a free “Naturally Elegant Doormat” which will show up in the in-game mail after the fact and become available for use in decorating your house. It’s not a bad doormat! Worth the, like, four clicks it takes to get it. Once you have one, you can also buy more copies of it from Tuuran and Gabbi near the Trading Posts in Stormwind and Orgrimmar, in case you want a house just full of mats.
Perhaps even more delightful than just clicking around on the website though are some of the player reactions to the feature. In a Reddit thread about the announcement, a number of individuals have popped in to offer pleasant snark about the crossover, generally mixed in with commentary about how expensive real-life houses are nowadays.
“last sold in ‘88 for 49,000, now going for 449,000, cool cool cool,” reads the top comment by u/Helios420A
“Hasn’t had work done since Blackhand was Warchief,” writes u/Thesleek
“Does this mean blackrock will somehow get involved next?” asked u/notmyworkaccount5, making a very well-placed pun on BlackRock Inc, the investment company, and Blackrock, the World of Warcraft orc clan.
Now that I have my doormat, I will proceed to log in and rearrange my living room for the umpteenth time, wasting several hours before finally admitting I will never make anything as magical as the Ban’ethil Bohemian, and go back to adding spikes to my roof.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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