Usually when a previously pay-per-month MMO becomes free-to-play, it does so because it is struggling. Case in point: Dungeons and Dragons Online, which later this year will be moving from its current subscription based revenue model to a free-to-play model using micro transactions to maintain profitability .
The last MMO anyone would expect to become free-to-play would be the world’s biggest; World of Warcraft.
WoW’s Game Director, Tom Chilton, mentioned in an interview with Videogamer that he does not know if WoW will ever become free-to-play.
Obviously the possibility is there, and Chilton did suggest the possibility of WoW moving into the micro-transaction arena which has players paying real-world money for in-game objects. The question then would be, would Blizzard do this and still maintain the subscription fees?
VideoGamer.com asked Chilton “Will WoW always be subscription based? Could it ever have a micro-transaction/free-to-play model?”
Chilton responded “I certainly think it’s possible that we could do some kind of micro-transaction stuff. Whether or not World of Warcraft ever goes the direction of, I guess like Anarchy Online has gone the direction of going free-to-play with micro-transactions. Whether we ever shift to a free-to-play model is really too hard to say at this point. Anything I say now could easily five years from now end up seeming like, oh my gosh, that was an incredibly dumb thing to say, how naive!”
Videogamer also asked Chilton how long WoW would last. Chilton responded “I’m willing to guess that someday the servers will be shut off, but it will probably be many years from now. When that might be I don’t really know, but I think it’s going to be quite a while still.”
At present Blizzard has no reason to consider making WoW free-to-play. With over 10million paying monthly subscribers, they would have to be insane to even give it a second thought.
Go to Videogamer for the full interview.
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