 "World of Warcraft not made for free-to-play business model, says Blizzard")
While Blizzard’s MMORPG, World of Warcraft, has been going strong for a bit over nine years now, many have been saying that the recent drop in player subscriptions means that the game will end up going free-to-play soon. The company, however, thinks differently. Some of WoW’s developers told Eurogamer that a move to free-to-play was completely off the table.
“We didn’t make the game to be free-to-play,” Production Director J Allen Brack told the source. “We would have to rework the game pretty significantly in order to make it free-to-play. It’s not something we’re currently considering.”
Currently, World of Warcraft has a monthly subscription required to play. However, if you don’t want access to all of the content, you can try out the first 20 levels of the game for free as part of the Starter Edition. Many believed the Starter Edition to be Blizzard transitioning WoW to a free-to-play model.
You are not prepared to go free-to-play!
Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime announced last week in an earnings call that over the last three months, WoW has lost 100,000 more subscribers, which brings it to around 7.6 million total subscriptions. While not a small number by any stretch of the imagination, it still pales in comparison to the success the game saw during Wrath of the Lich King, when it soared up to more than 12 million active subscriptions.
“Player response to the content has been good, and we saw increased engagement that has contributed to maintaining relatively stable subscribership quarter-over-quarter,” Morhaime said. “We’ll continue to invest heavily in World of Warcraft to deliver frequent, high-quality content to our players.”
Blizzard recently announced the Warlords of Draenor expansion pack for World of Warcraft which involves players going back in time to visit the planet Draenor during the Warcraft 1-3 era. It currently doesn’t have a release date, but we expect a closed beta to kick off towards the end of 2014.
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