Hearthstone's first in-game pet is only available via a gacha mechanic that will cost most players a whopping 158 bucks

One of my favorite and most-used memes is an image of William Hurt, taken from the film A History of Violence, expressing disbelief that a simple, straightforward task could be utterly botched by someone who is presumably a professional in his field. The facial expression is so clear and definitive that I often like to share it without any accompanying text, because it conveys the message so well entirely on its own.

You've surely seen it before but just in case, it looks like this:

It comes to mind in this moment because Blizzard unleashed the first "interactive pet" for Hearthstone yesterday, and hoo boy, it is not going well. The problem isn't the pet itself: King Krush chomps and roars, he reacts to actions and emotes, and he's just all around cute. Aesthetically, I have no notes. The trouble is with how he's acquired, and more specifically the cost involved.

King Krush is one of 10 possible prizes that can be pulled at the Darkmoon Faire Treasures stall, a sort of online claw machine "where everyone's a winner," as Blizzard put it. Unfortunately, anyone who's been duped by the ring toss game at the carnival can probably see where this is going.

"Your first pull at the Treasures stall is free of charge," Blizzard explained. "Just press the button and receive one random item from the prize pool. After that, the cost increases with each additional pull."

"Every time you pull, you’ll receive another treasure from the remaining items on display. That’s right: no dupes, no duds! Each pull guarantees a reward, and every reward is always a brand-new cosmetic, aside from the Golden Card Pack. The rarer a reward, the less likely you will get it until closer to the end—but every item, including the Pet and Diamond Legendary, is always a potential prize. And if you want the full set, you can get all 10 items in exactly 10 pulls."

Only 10 pulls! That sounds okay, yeah? But the devil is in the details, as they say, and they are devilish indeed.

First, the odds based on your first pull, as provided on a separate page (note that you'll also have to select the "Darkmoon Faire Treasures" tab if you want to see the numbers) reveal that you have a 0.1% chance of snagging King Krush.

With each additional pull, a reward is removed from the list and the odds to pull remaining prizes go up. But not by very much in the case of King Krush, as you can see from the table below: After four pulls, and four rewards removed from the table, your odds of scoring the pet on the fifth pull are now 0.3922%—an improvement of less than half of one percent.

The real kick in the bits, though, is the escalating cost for those pulls. The first one is free! And if you take 10 pulls to get King Krush, which is not a certainty but awfully close to it, it'll cost you 158 bucks all told. Yowzah!

You can actually simulate the whole process now over at Hearthpwn, which has built a handy Darkmoon Faire Treasures Simulator that lets you pull prizes just as would in the game, but without spending any money. (And without gaining any real prizes, to be clear.)

It's very illustrative of how it all works—I've run through it several times and this has been my outcome each and every time.

Blizzard says in its pricing chart that the cost conversion (because you actually buy runestones, Hearthstone's premium currency, and then use that for your Treasures pulls) is "based on most expensive Runestone price-per-unit available in shop, disregarding any quantity discounts and other promotional offers." The implication is that it's possible to get King Krush a little cheaper by purchasing runestones in bulk, but the largest bundle offered for sale is 8,000 runestones, which goes for $79.99—that's $160 for enough runestones to cover the whole thing, so no discount there at all.

Not that it matters a whole lot because even if Blizzard was to throw a 20% discount on the 8,000 runestone bundle, you're still looking at just shy of $130 for a little digital dinosaur who farts around in the bottom corner of your screen while you play Hearthstone. That's absolutely bananas.

I'm not the only one who thinks so. "King Krush deserved better than being paywalled for $158," Hearthstone content creator Zeddy wrote on X. "This is the first pet ever, why would you not make it more accessible? So disappointing for such an adorable boy."

Plenty of similar sentiments can be seen on Reddit:

Comment from r/hearthstone

There are a handful of fans defending the pricing, some imagining that by making lots of money on this pet Blizzard will be able to maintain and even expand Hearthstone for long into the future, and others taking the simpler approach that nobody needs this thing and if you want it bad enough to spend $158, then go nuts.

But even as someone who pretty reliably believes that people should do what they want with their money as long as they're not hurting anyone else, this seems egregious. $158 for a tarted-up Tamagotchi you can't actually take anywhere is absolutely outrageous, and worse, it's camouflaged in the sort of language I'd expect to hear from carneys shouting at me as I walk past their booths in the sweaty nights of late summer: Everyone's a winner! No dupes, no duds! Each pull guarantees a reward!

Blizzard does provide links to more information about Darkmoon Faire Treasure pricing and odds in the announcement, but it's all external: The closest thing there is to an up-front acknowledgement that this is going to cost a lot of money is a note that after your first free pull, "the cost increases with each additional pull."

There's some expectation among fans that Blizzard will dial back the pricing to make it a little less offensive to the senses, but a fairly substantial portion of the player base takes the more cynical view that the company will simply ride it out, because enough people will pay the high price for King Krush that it will justify the anger amongst the rest. Certainly, there has been little downward movement on the also eye-watering cost of mythic hero skins or signature card bundles in the game so far, so the idea that Blizzard will blink when it comes to pets strikes me as extremely optimistic.

As far as I'm concerned, this feels like a a straight-up cash grab by a game company that unthinkingly assumes its players will get in line and spend money as directed, because it has no real reason not to think that. Whether it's gone too far with this triple-digit doodad and the whole thing ultimately proves to be a botch, we will have to wait and see—for now, I've reached out to Blizzard for comment and will update if I receive a reply.