World of Warcraft's new housing bundle costs $75, and the timing couldn't have been worse

World of Warcraft Midnight was supposed to be a turning point for Blizzard's age-old MMORPG. It added housing and it reshaped Quel'Thalas. It improved the UI and kicked some of the best WoW addons to the kerb; for better or for worse. But, post-launch, it's struggled to stick the landing. Patch 12.0.5 has been a buggy mess, with player housing being switched off in both the Americas and Oceania due to game-breaking bugs. As Blizzard rushes out fixes and attempts to quell the flames, it's added insult to injury by dropping a new, $75 housing bundle. Talk about bad timing.

World of Warcraft's new Cozy Treehouse Retreat bundle lets you transform your home into either a grassy, forest-inspired paradise, or a pink, Asian-style cherry blossom fantasy. It comes with various exterior and interior decor packs, which include rock ponds, privacy screens, picnic blankets, leaf-shaped rugs, and more.

It is, however, priced at 7,500 Hearthsteel - Midnight's new housing-focused premium currency that can only be purchased via Battle.net. This equates to $75 / £67.50 if you buy the 2,500 and 5,000 Hearthsteel bundles separately, or $100 / £90 if you just go for the 10,000 bundle. It's a little bit cheaper than the $90 Trader's Gilded Brutosaur mount, but not by much.

It's worth noting that you can get all of the items individually, so if you, like me, love a rock pool, you'll be parting with 600 Hearthsteel. The Lush Garden and Spring Blossom packs, which include all of the interior decor items, can also be bought separately for 2,500 Hearthsteel ($25 / £22.50) each, while just the exteriors for both packs come in at 4,000 (~$50 / £45) for the two bundled together. While those prices are better than $75, they're still pretty high.

In its Hearthsteel explainer blog post from November 2025, Blizzard does state that, while "the vast majority of housing items are (and will continue to be) earnable in-game," there will be "a small fraction" of items that are only available from the Battle.net store. It compares this to mounts, where there are "more than a thousand mounts earnable in-game and only a few dozen from the shop."

Ordinarily, I'd accept that: games have to make money somehow. But the timing here is absolutely abysmal.

Patch 12.0.5 has left a horrible taste in everyone's mouths - even Blizzard itself has admitted that it "was not up to [its] standards." I commend how quick it's been to fix some of the more glaring issues, but the update shouldn't have shipped like this.

It doesn't do much to abate my concerns that this quickened, more condensed expansion schedule isn't giving the devs enough time to fully perfect upcoming content. The Worldsoul Saga is a first for WoW: it's getting new updates in our hands quicker, but at what cost? I'm sure we'd all rather have good content rather than half-baked, bug-ridden messes - Cyberpunk 2077 can attest to that.

Moreover, dropping a $75 housing set that, bluntly, a lot of players wouldn't even have been able to use a week ago, doesn't do much to inspire trust. World of Warcraft's community is dedicated, and we've endured an awful lot, but there are a whole slew of other MMOs out there. Sure, many don't have the same level of history or nostalgia, but they do exist, and they certainly feel pretty tempting right now.

As someone who truly loves WoW, I really hope that Blizzard knuckles down and gets back to doing what it does best. There's only so much I can truly forgive.