14 DAY TRIAL // World of Warcraft, Blizzard's long-running Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, won't go free-to-play anytime soon, as Blizzard is still quite happy with the current number of subscribers and hopes that the huge title could influence a single-player Warcraft 4.
World of Warcraft came out back in 2004 and delivered a stunning online experience that set the bar for the whole genre and generated a huge amount of money based on the monthly subscription needed to play the online game.
More recently, however, the number of subscribers has dwindled and many similar MMOs are going free-to-play in order to keep their worlds relevant.
World of Warcraft, however, won't go this route according to Blizzard's Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton, who talked to RPS.
"[Free-to-play] is not really an active discussion, to be honest," he admitted. "Number one, the subscription model, we’re still happy with the number of players we have. But number two, going free-to-play is a dramatic game design change. At that point, we have to decide what’s available and what’s not."
"At that point, there’s a lot of terrible examples of how that’s been done. Some are better than others, but you’re still compromising the design of the game to make the actual payment system of the game work. That’s the part that I think is most devastating to World of Warcraft."
He also went on to speculate that, if Blizzard's Real Time Strategy team went on to make Warcraft 4, the next installment in the original series, it could end up borrowing from WoW.
"Where I think about it, if we ever did Warcraft IV, I would want it to somehow play off this world that’s been made over the last ten years. I would love to see that if that’s what [the RTS team] decided they wanted to do. Heroes of the Storm is dominating that group at this point, though."
"But I’d love to see Warcraft IV take shape around what we did with WoW. Because so much of WoW came from Warcraft. Like, we were able to take a single map and turn it into a whole expansion. Stuff like that. It’d be cool to see them take our stuff and convert it back down."
Even so, Blizzard is currently focusing on several big projects, including World of Warcraft's Warlords of Draenor expansion, Diablo 3's Reaper of Souls add-on, and the Heroes of the Storm MOBA, not to mention StarCraft 2's Legacy of the Void chapter.