Blizzard Will Consider Making Its Titles Free-to-Play
Date: 10-25-2011 Views:
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In an interview with VentureBeat at BlizzCon 2011, Blizzard chief operating officer, Paul Sams has revealed that the World Of Warcraft developer has teams already working on mobile and tablet, and the company would consider making its titles free-to-play.
VB: A lot of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games are experimenting with a "freemium" model and finding varying degrees of success. Obviously, World of Warcraft is not sinking. It doesn't need to do the DC Universe Online thing where it's like, "Oh, we're free to play now, let's hope this saves us." But what's Blizzard's stance on the freemium pricing model? Do you see it as a viable option for an existing or future game?PS: It's a very interesting business model and approach. Whether or not we will end up doing that at some point or not, I don't really have the information to share. But certainly it's possible that could happen with an existing product that we have. I think what you tend to see is that happening when games are on a decline or they don't have a user base that can support itself through subscriptions. So then they'll introduce the new model in hopes of being able to generate a different type of revenue to support that community and ongoing content. So it certainly is possible, if we find ourselves in that circumstance, or if we come up with a game where we think that's the right business model, the most appropriate for players to experience it. We don't have any opposition to the concept, it's just that at this point we haven't decided to make a game where that is the model. But that doesn't mean that we won't.
Sams also talked specifically about Blizzard's stance on mobile or casual gaming. You can learn more on VentureBeat.
