Quote Originally Posted by Colorful View Post
An argument to people screaming that it's optional? Yep, citing other MMOs that have went down the same route, the same group of people claimed it was only optional stuff and that the majority was still in the game, and that changed fast.
The few subscription-required MMOs that I know that have gone down the same route with a cash shop (it's not a long list after all) haven't changed from having the majority still be in-game.

Those that shifted the lion's share of stuff to optional purchases via cash shop are pretty much all games that also shifted to a F2P model, wherein the cash shop becomes the main source of revenue instead of subscriptions.

Now, most mounts in game are a literal reskin (not even adding extra armour in some cases).
That's not exactly a new thing. Even as far back as The Burning Crusade most mounts added were reskins of a select set. Netherwings were just reskinned drake models and most options were simple recolors. On occasion they have made greater variations and the occasional unique model (usually attached to a raid boss - something they are still doing with the current one for killing Heroic or Mythic Archimonde), but since 2004 most in-game available mounts have been reskins of a specific set of the already available mounts. The only store-bought mount that I can think of that doesn't already have an equivalent version in the game (with reskins of it also available from various sources in the game) is the armored bat mount.

So yeah...WoW doing more reskins than new mounts is almost a decade old at this point.