World of Warcraft is not going free to play. They are not giving new Battle.net accounts thirty days of unlimited access to pre-Pandaria Warcraft. And they are not, that we know of right now, going to pull the rug out from under us after Draenor launches and move to a freemium model. (That is, free to play with one or more subscription/subscription-like premium options.) So all of you subscription or bust dinosaurs can calm your tits and get out of the way.
That's right. I called hardcore proponents of subscription-based MMORPGs dinosaurs. Because it's not 2010 any more, and we don't have to be afraid of the words "free," "to," and "play" any more. I'm not going to go so far as to say that there is no future for subscription-based games, because there are still more than enough of us that prefer to just fork over a given amount of money each month to get unlimited access to a game and all of its features. But it's hard to ignore that there is a LARGE portion of the MMO-playing community that favors an a la carte approach. They don't want to pay for services or content until they need them. By offering a game up as free to play (or even buy to play, depending on your price tag) a publisher immediately makes their game accessible to pretty much anyone with an internet connection and a computer.
Even Blizzard has been able to push hubris to the side enough to offer a free trial, and while that opens up a little bit of leeway for "walk-up" players. That is, players who don't have any kind of direct initial attachment to the game or franchise, but who are looking for something new or different to try. And it's a lot easier to drag your friends from game to game if they don't have to immediately plunk down fifty dollars or better before they even know if they're going to stay around or not. All that said, let's face it. Twenty levels is barely enough gameplay to figure out basic mechanics, let alone form a connection with the game. Trials typically lock new players out of open communication, the ingame economy...
The restrictions are well-intentioned. They keep spam to a minimum, discourage the use of trial accounts for illicit RMT, and are supposed to encourage people to purchase the game or subscribe. Only here's what generally happens:
Fr00bie: omg this game is so awesome I can shoot and stab and RAWR! Look! A knife! How do I use?
Local: Fr00bie: how i use nife?
System Message: Error; Trial accounts cannot use local
Fr00bie: omg this game sucks I'm gonna go play FreeStabbingShootyMans Online instead.
Please, for the love of Freya, someone make an MMO called FreeStabbingShootyMans Online.
All jokes aside, the MMORPG market has been diluted in recent years by mass-produced free-to-play games on mobile and traditional platforms which offer everything from 100% free gameplay with paid "flavor" content to one-time "unlock" purchases that flag the user's account for unlimited access for all time. A lot of old-timers scoff and demand to know how the games plan to stay afloat when they're giving everything away for free, but here's the point:
They are. They're wildly successful. The companies that have them make a LOT of money. No, they don't have subscriber figures in the tens of millions, but they don't need them. I guess what I'm getting at is that a game does not need to be subscription-based to flourish, and in today's MMO industry, a sub-only model is probably a hindrance.
Look at Everquest 2. The game was floundering, rife with retention problems and losing devs left right and center. Then they go f2p. There's still a sub option, and get this: players actively encourage others to subscribe, and it works. They offer enough of the game to catch interest, and offer characters enough freedom to form the connections that will keep them in the game for a longer time.
EQ2's not a perfect example, but it's one that's near and dear to my heart. When the players are complaining about cities feeling like ghost towns and only ever seeing the same old faces... Opening the floodgates to the unwashed froobie masses is the best option, even if the players don't initially realize it. The game that everyone pronounced dead two years into its lifespan, which everyone thought had been crushed under the titanic weight of World of Warcraft... is still going strong, is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and has an expansion on the way. Maybe more importantly, it has another franchise game coming down the pipeline and a fanbase eager to play it.
World of Warcraft...has nothing but people drawing attention to its rapidly dwindling population, server mergers, and speculating that its next expansion is just going to be a waste of time and money. WoW should have made the free-to-play leap when Cata released and hit the reset button on half the content in the game. Blizzard should have kept the standard subscription; offered a premium subscription with perks like accelerated xp, special heirloom items, and some kind of raid lockout override; and introduced one or two tiers of free play with varying degrees of freedom. Yes, it would have required modifications to the raid difficulty settings, and PvP queues... But it would have been worth it. The press and publicity could have floated the game another couple of years without some schmuck pulling out his stethoscope and trying to pronounce the game dead.
So yes. I wish the rumors about WoW going free to play were true. Not just because I really want to play right now but don't have the cash to sub, but because I genuinely want to see the game last.
World of Warcraft is not going free-to-play. That was a targeted promotion. And World of Warcraft is not dying. It's just finally hitting an equilibrium point with the other franchises in the industry. The game is, however, at a very important point in its lifespan, and whether or not it lasts another five or ten years is going to depend heavily on how Blizzard handles the next twelve months.
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