Alternate History: WoW Originally Conceived As Free-To-Play
Gamasutra was lucky enough to witness an interview between GDC executive director Jamil Moledina and Blizzard SVP of game design, Rob Pardo, that took place onstage at Paris GDC this week. Between glasses of wine, Pardo and Moledina discussed some relatively dry topics such as managing multiple franchises and balancing feedback in Starcraft 2.
Pardo also let loose a little secret about the business model that Blizzard originally conceived for World of Warcraft:
"If you make it subscription here, and free to play in Korea, that doesn't work, because it's a global community, and the other regions wouldn't like it, because everyone knows what everyone's doing. And the game design might not support it."
Interestingly, Pardo commented on this subject: "When we were first going to make World of Warcraft, we wanted to make it free and advertising supported."
However, the Blizzard exec noted: "We didn't want to charge a subscription, but as we researched market conditions, we realized that wouldn't support us."
Oh, if only!
Paris GDC: The Rob Pardo Experience [Gamasutra]
[via VE3D]
tiny dancer
Posted to Video Games on 24 June 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: blizzard, free to play, rob pardo, world of warcraft, wow
If it was free, it is possible I'd still be playing it. With MMO's there's a constant mental battle for me every month as to whether or not I'm justifying the fee. Am I playing it enough? Am I enjoying it still? Lately I take the easy way out and just freeze it. I did it with a bunch of the old ones, and FFXI, WoW... and I just froze my Age of Conan account too.
That being said, ads are irritating, and I assume free to play would be ridiculously hard to keep running. Fees are kind of an unfortunate reality for games of this type and scale methinks.