Ever since big MMO titles such as Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons, Blizzard have started to think about making their famous pay-to-play MMO free as well.
Tom Chilton, WoW’s lead designer, was interviewed on PC Gamer, and was asked if at some point WoW will be a free game, he replied by saying, “If another game comes along and blows us away it may not make sense for us to have a subscription fee, or even further down the line, when we have another MMO out.”
He later on explained why other companies are turning their games into free-to-play.
“I feel like they’re doing that to compete with other games that are on a similar subscriber level to what they were at,” he explained.
“I imagine that when one of them went free to play it cannibalized some of the other subscribers. I can definitely imagine that being the case with World of Warcraft.” he added.
But don’t get hyped up too soon, he said that, “We’re not spending a lot of time thinking about it. It’s not something that’s a reality for us in the near future.”