Will World of Warcraft ever go free-to-play?
Currenlty World of Warcraft has the biggest online subscription in the history of online gaming. With its latest Cataclysm expansion selling nearly 5 million copies in the first month alone. The game should remain popular and successful for years to come. Still, even Blizzard admits: It can’t stay on top forever.
What does this mean to us, the players that pay money for it.
If what happened to Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online is any clue, World of Warcraft might move to a free-to-play model. Since switching to free-to-play, both of Turbine’s games added subscribers and increased revenues.
Trouble on the horizon?
To be sure, World of Warcraft is sitting in a terrific spot right now. It has a strong, incredibly loyal user base. WoW is easily Blizzard’s most lucrative intellectual property.
That can’t last forever, though. In a recent interview with Gamasutra, Blizzard COO Paul Sams said he expects Blizzard’s upcoming Titan MMO will eventually eclipse World of Warcraft as the company’s top intellectual property. From Gamasutra:
“I see World of Warcraft as having many more years in front of it,” Sams forecast. “We have over 12 million subscribers. We’re continuing to grow and we feel very good about them. We’re going to continue to support that product for many, many years to come.”
Certainly, World of Warcraft could remain profitable and supportable in its current form even if Titan starts eating away at its user base, so moving in a free-to-play direction would not be something Blizzard would do lightly. It’s a major change that requires an entirely new business model, along with a huge new set of risks.
Understanding the free-to-play model
The most important thing to understand about the free-to-play model is that a game simply can’t be free for everyone. Running an MMORPG costs money, and running an MMORPG on the scale of World of Warcraft requires a lot of money. Servers are expensive. Customer service is expensive. Creating new content is expensive. In a free-to-play model, these expenses are covered by whales — a small portion of the gaming population that willingly pays an exorbitant amount of money for an exorbitant amount of in-game extras.
According to Ferrari, the industry operates according to the 80-20 rule — that is, 20% of the players provide 80% of the revenue. That is, of course, very different from the way the subscription-based World of Warcraft currently operates.
