Do you think WoW Will become F2P?

Possibly in the future. For now, the game's going to stay the course as far as I'm concerned. It wouldn't surprise me if this happens down the road, though.

 

It's tough to move a game like WoW from a P2P model to a F2P model. The reason why games like SWTOR and ESO was able to move from a P2P to a F2P model is because they aren't nearly as massive as WoW in terms of support-staff, game development, marketing, administration and management. On top of the fact that the hardware and software needed to make the game work.

In the off-chance that WoW moves to a F2P model is the day Activision-Blizzard cuts down its running costs to a skeleton crew. Which also means why the Guild Wars franchise can be played for free forever after you buy the initial base game. ArenaNet has a bit over 300 employees. Blizzard Entertainment has more than 4,700 people just for its base company.

 

I don't think it will be possible, at least not for another 10 years or so. I mean it seems ridicoulus but you have to keep in mind that producres of the game thought that WoW will peek it's subsriber's base at 1 million people. And oh boy were they wrong. And yet even with 1 million subsribers they intended a P2P model. It's simple. The game is known for it's quality both in terms of gameplay and it's support. And I'm sure they wouldn't want to tarnish their reputation by thrasing the game in the end.

 

I agree with this. Blizzard is just such a huge company and WoW is such a huge franchise that I really can't imagine it, as it is now, going F2P.

I actually hope it doesn't. I don't think $15 is unreasonable for literally unlimited entertainment, and I sometimes wonder what kind of game it would turn into if even that small price were gone. I don't like the idea of having to pay to get a lot of content...I mean, we can pay now to get vanity pets or mounts or vanity gear, but if we have to pay to unlock certain levels or something (I mean, more than an expansion) I think it would be upsetting to me.

My husband plays EQ and I'm pretty sure they went F2P to a point, although he still pays $15 a month for it so maybe they didn't.

 

Not at all. They're losing subs fast, but they're still something close to 10 million subscribers I think. You just don't give that up for nothing. I do think they need to step up their development on the game if they want to maintain success with the game.

Either way, I hope they don't transition into F2P gameplay. Every and any game that does that ends up being a tremendous failure and getting worse. SWOTR comes to mind. It works for games Runescape because that's the natural progression of the game and they started with accs on F2p and then you get a membership.

 

Its unlikely they will switch anytime soon. I've seen the general MMO lifespan. F2P only happens when its more financially viable than P2P. Which considering were all paying $15 tells me it gonna be a LONG time before WoW goes F2P.

 

I think it could happen, and you may be able to play a few levels and do some exploring in the game for a few hours would be good to get new people to like the game. It will be interesting if it does happen and I reckon they should so people can try it out though it will depend on the download speed as well and also how long it takes will be the thing to think about. This could be a new concept that may happen in a few years time and will get some people to appreciate the World of Warcraft games as wel.

 

It's highly unlikely that a change from P2P to F2P could ever happen, considering the major success of Blizzard's current marketing system. Even discounting the difficulty required to switch WoW to an F2P system, it seems extremely unlikely to ever happen. The day that WoW becomes F2P is potentially the day the entire MMORPG genre has a heart attack.

 

I think its a long time still before WoW becomes F2P, and for the love of god, I hope it doesnt become pay to win. But yeah, if you look at the introduction of the wow token, the price of it set so high (in terms of in game gold) that I doubt it will ever become free to play. It could be interesting though if eventually blizzard are forced to set the price of the tokens at lower and lower prices,

 

I highly doubt they'll ever become F2P, but I will soon be playing F2P with the WoW tokens I'm saving up should really work on some of my skills to collect gold.

 

I don't see WoW going free to play anytime soon. I think it would take a significant loss of subscribers before that would happen. It wouldn't bother me if it did however.

 

It will never happen. Games don´t go f2p until they are significantly under a million subs.. WOW is still over 7M subscribers which comes out to about a billion dollars a year. MMORPGs that are f2p make maybe a couple million per year.

People need to forget about subscriber numbers, forget about what other games are doing.. WOW is making a billion dollars a year.. you don´t just go and risk that and hope you can sell enough stuff in a cash-shop to earn even a fraction of that.

 

Eventually, but not right now. It's still free for the first 20 levels. So that's probably their way of testing out the f2p eventuality. It's down to around 7 million plus paying subscribers as it stands today. So there is still money to be made for now. Keyphrase "for now".

 

Popular older games never really go entirely "free to play." Hell, they are still making money off people who play Ultima Online (which existed before the original Everquest). The games that go completely free to play are ones who with-in 1 - 2 years have hemoraged subscriptions at an astonishing rate

 

WoW will never be entirely free to play. They would be losing to much money and eventually die out. Especially since the expense of running their servers are very high.

 

I think if WoW wants to stay in the radar of best MMORPG out there, they have to switch to free to play because it's really not doing to well at the moment i think. I mean so many players are dropping their memberships. Ironically, if WoW wants to stay in business, they need to stop asking for money to play their game.

 

If it will, it will be in the far, far future. In fact, I imagine we're more likely to get World of Warcraft 2 or Warcraft 4 before we're getting an official free-to-play version of WoW. I would actually love for Blizzard to make it free-to-play, or at least ease up on the restrictions of the Starter Edition (maybe bump the level cap a bit), but it won't happen soon.

 

It'll probably never be F2P unless Blizzard are really desperate for new players. I don't believe we should expect it since WoW probably has at least 5 years of popularity.

 

I think the closest it will become to f2p is the recent WoW tokens they released. World of Warcraft is too grand to actually become f2p for bots to reign over. I'd say Blizzard is giving us a lot of leeway by adding all the expansions besides WoD in the battlechest for $20 as well as the release of WoW tokens.