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Blizzard dropping gender change charge for World of Warcraft

Blizzard dropping gender change charge for World of Warcraft

Blizzard is removing the fee for changing a character's gender in World of Warcraft.

Speaking to Eurogamer, executive producer John Hight said that the upcoming Shadowlands expansion will allow players to do this entirely free of charge at an in-game barber shop.

"A long time ago, we had the ability for players to go in - it was actually a paid service - and change their character. Much of that is now in the barber shop in the game," he said.

"And as we were adding things up in Shadowlands, we realised: 'Gosh the only way you can change your gender in World of Warcraft is to go through this paid service.' And we felt like that's not the right message.

"Unfortunately we can't fix that right now but it is our intent with Shadowlands to take that out of being a paid service thing and [put it] in the barber shop. But that's not something we can easily hotfix - unfortunately we can't do that right now. It is something that we're going to have in Shadowlands itself."

World of Warcraft Shadowlands is set to launch later this year. The expansion will be supporting Xbox's Adaptive Controller, given that players had been using third-party tools like Console Port 17 to use a gamepad on PC. Earlier this week, Blizzard also revealed that it would be merging less populated WoW servers with more popular ones in the near future.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.