I sure hope not.
This article by Gamespot (and several other sites) makes it sound like WoW lead designer Tom Chilton says that the game may do away with its current subscription fees. This should be taken with enough grains of salt to choke a pony: the original interview from PC Gamer makes it quite clear that this is not the case. “We’re not spending a lot of time thinking about it," Chilton is quoted by PC Gamer. "It’s not something that’s a reality for us in the near future.”
This got me thinking, though: would I want to keep playing Warcraft if it got rid of the monthly fee and instead relied on microtransactions for income?
Right now, paying between $14.50-$16.00+ is not so bad (I'm Canadian, so the price fluctuates monthly). I justify it as "entertainment" spending: for the price of one movie (sans snacks), I have as much entertainment as I want. Changing to a microtransaction-based payment system could either be much cheaper or much more expensive. Cheaper is always better, but $15-ish is pretty much my limit for monthly entertainment right now. If I feel like I'm missing huge chunks of the game because I'm not willing to shell out my (non-existent) big bucks to play, then I would probably just quit altogether.
The way I see it, players would probably be paying for new content and cosmetic items:
Content:
This sort of already happens with expansion packs, but those have new content added to them on a fairly regular basis, and the expansion is a one-time cost. If they changed the game to be based on microtransactions, Blizzard could charge players to play new content, which could get expensive for progression guilds.
Also, what about when content gets old? Do players still have to pay to play? If they reduced or eliminated the cost once the next dungeon/raid was released, then players could potentially just wait to play new content until it wasn't new anymore. This seems like it would defeat the entire purpose of the game.
Cosmetic:
This also already happens to a fair degree, with fancy pets and mounts costing players real-life money. I have two of the pets myself: the Wind Rider Cub (who has been named Gale) and the Griffin (named Ken Griffin Jr.). I would not have bought on my own, as I would feel very silly paying for plushies and virtual pets. These two pets were fantastic presents from my lovely boyfriend, who is apparently immune from feeling silly.
I actually wouldn't mind so much if Blizzard started adding free cosmetic items that could be worn over your real gear (adding no stats, just cool looks). I am a huge sucker for awesome-looking gear - for example, I wore my Wolfshead Helm until I was level 65, just because it looked so cool. However, I would not pay actual money to look virtually cool, though I can't say the same for the hundreds of thousands of people who purchased the $25.00 Celestial Steed mount.
So, perhaps a microtransaction-based system would work well for Warcraft - they've clearly proved that many players will snap up pricey cosmetic items to look cool - but I wonder if they would be able to retain their massive number of accounts (11.5 million, as of 2008) if they switched. For it to make any sense to make the switch, they would have to see it as being more profitable than their subscription payments are currently. By my calculations, they make $2,070,000,000 - that's over $2 billion - per year from subscriptions alone. There would have to be a lot of content - or some very expensive content - in order to justify the switch.
So, after thinking about it some more, it really doesn't look like WoW will become a microtransaction-based game any time soon. Sorry, ridiculous game journalists - your out-of-context quotes and attention-grabbing stories ain't foolin' this playa.
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