World of Warcraft is the most successful subscription MMO in history, having 12 million players that pay some form of annual fee every month. Still, the rise of free-to-play games has made some wonder if World of Warcraft will switch to a similar model; Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard, admits there are some strengths to F2P games.
As it relates to free to play, I do think that is an interesting business model, said Sams. But it is not going to allow those companies to create the type of complexity and experience that a subscription-based title like World of Warcraft can have. The fact of the matter is, the companies that make high-quality games have to have monetary backing and they have to be able to generate revenue that covers the costs of initial and ongoing development.
We have these recurring revenue streams, which allows us to invest and to provide experiences and services to our players unlike any other company, added Sams. The free-to-play games have to go about trying to find other revenue streams, and those revenue streams are inherently smaller. That means the game development budgets are inherently smaller. That is not to say you cannot have an awesome free-to-play game that costs less to make. There are lots of examples of those successful games. I do think that with the free-to-play games you may reach audiences that you don t traditionally reach with the subscription games. That makes sense because you are not going to find a lot of casual first-time gamers signing up for a $15 a month subscription.
The free-to-play games serve an important role, he noted. Like the theme parks that compete with Disneyland. You can go see all of those experiences, and then you will come and do it all with us. We are going to create the most immersive experience and the most engaging, deep experiences. That is because we can put a big budget behind our efforts that the free-to-play games can t match. I like these other games personally and I dig the fact that small development teams can work on games again. There was a period of time that was not possible because the budgets had gotten so big.
Switching over to the next MMO Blizzard is working on, Sams said there will be a balance with World of Warcraft content. We intend to do more expansions too. There is no change in our thinking. We intend absolutely positively to continue to support the existing World of Warcraft product, said Sams. There are over 12 million global paying subscribers that are active in our game. We are not going to turn our back on them and we intend to continue to support that franchise for many many years to come. As to our new unannounced game, we believe that it will be more complementary than competitive. And while people do have a limited amount of free time that they can devote to these types of games, we do think that people will want to check out the new and the old. We think the new one is very compelling and is going to capture a lot of hearts and minds and will be very successful for us. But we also believe that many people will continue playing World of Warcraft because they have such a huge collection of friends and community. We have taken some of our most experienced developers and put them on this project. We believe we have a dream team. These are the people who made WoW a success. We are going to blow people s minds.
Source: VentureBeat
