With western MMOs like Lord of the Rings Online, Company of Heroes, and Dungeons and Dragons Online embracing the free-to-play game model, Blizzard has recently had to ask itself some difficult questions about its World of Warcraft strategy. Questions like, “What should I eat for lunch?”
Lead desinger Tom Chilton isn’t concerned with losing the massive WoW fanbase any time soon, subscription fee or not.
“We’re not spending a lot of time thinking about [going free-to-play]. It’s not something that’s a reality for us in the near future,” Chilton said.
WoW is the largest and most profitable MMO in the western market, with some 11.5 million subscribers worldwide, and while lesser games need to compete with one another, WoW has confidently held the throne since its release in 2004. Chilton thinks that’s reason enough to avoid the free-to-play model for now.
“I feel like they’re doing that to compete with other games that are on a similar subscriber level to what they were at. I imagine that when one of them went free to play it cannibalized some of the other subscribers,” Chilton said.
It seems WoW is in no danger of being eaten up by any games currently on the market or in production. However, Chilton is still casually preparing for the worst.
“I can definitely imagine that being the case with World of Warcraft,” he said. “If another game comes along and blows us away it may not make sense for us to have a subscription fee. Or even further down the line, when we have another MMO out.”
So until Blizzard creates its own demise in the form of a new MMO, WoW will remain subscription-based. Which means we probably have at least another decade to wait, so keep that piggy bank full.
Do you mind paying to play one of the largest and most intricate MMOs in the world? How would free-to-play affect the game? Give us your opinions right here!
Only three games but a gazillion of fanboys to milk,sure they keep things like they are.I wouldn’t play their games even if they’d pay me for it.
No Blizzard stuff for me,deal with it.
I’m not a big fan of the free-to-play setup, mostly because I operate on a budget, and it’s easy to set aside 15 bucks a month to get access to everything rather than paying for items piecemeal. So if WoW wants to keep it subscription based, that’s fine with me.
no problem with that. the amount of updates they bring to the game is awesome… if you’re not the 24/7 hardcore raider you’ll never get to see everything even though they are tuning the difficulty for finding groups down…
i’ve been playing WoW for some years now and can’t complain.
tried several other mmo’s when i got little bored but never got into another.
then, always when i booting up WoW after some break time, i’m always realizing what makes this game so much better than other mmo’s out there, POLISH! – kinda self explanatory after all these years…
that’s it for me… always willing to try the next mmo’s on their way, lot of them look really promising.
I quit after Ulduar because the game has become watered down in the name of being more user friendly. When I realized that there will never be another Sunwell, and that content is no longer earned but given away and the only thing a hard core raider gets is hard modes.
The game is just not what it used to be and I think alot of people playing WoW are waiting for the next big MMO to come along (cough cough Old Republic cough cough). So maybe after that they might adjust their business model.
I can’t see Blizzard ever having problems with subscriptions until Star Wars TOR comes out, and even then I highly doubt they’ll lose their fan base in Asia. Koreans and BlizzWhores.
Free-to-play just means they nickle and dime you for crap that’s hard to live without. You’ll usually end up paying more than $15 a month if you want to stay competitive.
It’s a great model for mediocre/floundering MMOs to use. It exposes their game to a large number of people who would have otherwise completely ignored it, and maybe ends up hooking them into subscribing, or using the item-shop.
However, I don’t think such a model would benefit WoW, or its playerbase.
I love blizzards games and I recently stopped playing WoW because they fucked it up more for the casual audience which is really bad but Starcraft 2 is awesome!
But either blizz create their own demise with a new MMO or SWTOR will be their demise. Who knows???