Do you think WoW Will become F2P?

I don´t understand. Once you hit like like 80, just by questing you are going to make $20k gold a month. WOW is basically free2play right now for all but very casual players.

 

The announcement of the drop to 5.6 million subs ahead of the coming expansion does show that the game's age is starting to hurt it. The in-game economy has been flailing to combat inflation, and the addition of WoW Tokens was a way of attempting to stabilize that inflation. The fact of the matter is that the playerbase is shrinking and losing interest.

The next year will be key in maintaining the game's dominance of the MMO market. Unless Blizzard introduces new and interesting mechanics to revitalize the playerbase, F2P will become a necessity within 3 years. The sagging player numbers will continue to drop to the point that the sub model can no longer sustain the costs. I expect that WoW will drop almost permanently below 3 mil subs within 5 years.

 

I don't think the game game will go F2P anytime soon, but I do think that Blizzard needs to start thinking about it, in the next three to four years time. If the subs keep dropping like they're dropping (I did not expect to hear they were at 5.6 million subs.) now, Blizzard needs to think of something to regain the popularity, and I think in the future, going F2P is a very real possiblity. That being said, they're announcing a new expansion soon, so I don't expect any major business model changes in the next year.

 

I think we will have to see how the launch of Legion goes and if they hit 3M sales in the first week which has been the norm for them. My guess is that the demographics of the game are changing and there just is not going to be that hype to buy another box right away. WoD was very underwhelming and the fact that they eliminated a raid tier in order to sell the next box faster just doesn´t seem like a good plan.

 

I doubt it will be free to play any soon. I heard of the blizzard implementations of the WoW tokens but I don't think they plan to bring the game from here to be a free to play one. Maybe in a long future it might be but I don't think so

 

Not automatically but it's starting to transition towards a F2P model. The game has seen a long life but there's only so much that you can keep tacking on to try and extend the life of it. The days of full sub MMOs is pretty much over as a whole.

 

They might consider it if the user base gets too low, to draw more people in. Then the company runs off of the in game purchases to keep it afloat for the time being.

 

One of the ex-blizzard executives basically said the same thing at gamecon. There is just too much expense and too much risk building a huge MMORPG and then having it crash 6 months after launch.

Players have a hard time understanding the concept of profitability. A MMORPG can continue to be profitable, but that does not mean it was ever a good investment to actually make the game. Games like SWTOR and AOC are both profitable right now.. every month they bring in more money than they spend. But in both cases, they were horrible investments because they never earned back their initial cost. With AoC, Funcom had to write off $25M in losses about a year after launch because they knew they would never make back their initial investment.

 

Pretty much. Video games are funded the same way Hollywood films are. They have the make back initial investment if they want to keep getting funding as a studio. MMOs are a huge investment with no promise of return on investment. ESO was funded because investors thought that Skyrim's success would translate to a month to month sub.

Unlike movies that can get return on investment through extended sales over time and are a one time cost, MMOs require constant upkeep and maintenance to see a chance at recovering investment costs and see to making a profit on top of that.

 

It's hard to say, the spiralling WoW subscription numbers should give them a nudge into doing so but nevertheless WoW still makes millions even with it's lowering subscriber base. The expansions do bring quite a lot of people back but they aren't big enough to keep that playerbase. It's hard to say in the end, but personally I think that they will.

 

World of Warcraft is already kind of F2P for some people thanks to the WoW Token (i'm one of those people).
However, if the game keeps losing subscribers I think that there will be a lot of sales coming for multiple token bundles, etc. and eventually they may start implementing more in store mounts/pets/dungeons/encounters, etc. which can support further development of the game going into the F2P market.

 

Isn't Blizzard owned by Activision now? Activision can't even release a sixty dollar call of duty game without charging the players even more within the game. I definitely can't see this happening.

 

Maybe eventually, if they are releasing new expansions on a yearly basis. But for the near foreseeable future, I think subs for coins are as F2P as they will go. There's too much revenue to be lost right now from making it F2P for over 4 million people.

 

I honestly don;t see WoW ever becoming F2p. It's too big and has too much content for it to go F2p. Not only that but it would also lose a big part of the community and it would become more toxic.

 

Blizzard has a weird relationship with Activision. Vivendi originally held Blizzard as a subsidary company. They (Vivendi the parent company of Blizzard) merged with Activision. Then a couple years ago ActivisionBlizzard bought out Vivendi's half of the merger. During the whole thing Blizzard kept its autonomy for the most part.

 

Eventually it might come, but that's not for years, I don't think it will be at the moment because it's quite successful.

 

If they keep bleeding subscribers they might have to go f2p. I didn't originally think so but now it's over 5 million since their peak levels that have left.

 

The problem is customer service, which is a huge expense. I don´t think they can ever go free2play with their current playerbase who are used to sending in tickets for all kinda stupid stuff. I am not sure they want to have a few million players without customer service either. Games like LOL that are free, basically the players are used to no customer service.

I don´t think WOW will go free2play until they are sure they can get paid expansions out every 12 month.

 

True that. Though, I don't think that will happen for at least a year or two. Blizzard will need to do something to stem this downturn.

 

It doesn't usually work that way. They might but more often then not when I game loses half of it's subscriber base in large chunks it dies, even if slowly.