World of Warcraft game director Tom Chilton recently was interviewed at Now Gamer and had some interesting comments to make about the free-to-play model. Even bringing up World of Warcraft. Could the wildly popular World of Warcraft become free to play?! Read on!
A lot of MMO’s have recently been released that are free-to-play. Many believe this is the future of this genre, so why would anyone want to pay monthly subscription fees? Well, Chilton still believes in the subscription model saying, “If you think about how much time players typically spend in a game like World of Warcraft, whether it’s 20 hours a month, or in some cases 40, or 60, or 80, and you evaluate that against other forms of entertainment and what you’re getting out of it, it makes a lot of sense.”
With that being said Chilton also told Now Gamer, “I definitely think that free-to-play MMOs will be around for a very long time…At some point it’s possible that World of Warcraft could end up being free-to-play, but I do think there’s always room for there to be subscription games.” This is very telling as WoW is still one of the most popular MMO’s around with easily over 7 million active users. With all that in mind, MMO’s with subscription fees in general have an uphill battle to be able to contend with free-to-play.
World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and has had four expansions since then. Mists of Panderia being the newest one.
