To pay or not to pay ... is that really the question?
There's an editorial over at WarCry that's part opinion piece, part year-in-review, making the case that 2007 saw the demise of the subscription model -- paying a monthly fee for your favorite MMO. There is some sound reasoning in the piece, and it's a good read. However, I don't believe that people are unwilling to pay to play anymore. The simple fact is, people will pay for what they value, and right now the overwhelmingly valued property is World of Warcraft.
No one would be happier than I would if WoW magically went to a free model overnight. Paying the monthly fee is why I don't play for months on end. However, WoW seems to be hitting me just right -- no other MMO, free to play or not, approaches the experience I receive from WoW. I'm constantly trying new games of course, and I've just started up with Guild Wars (which, of course, is free to play). If I run across something that scratches that itch, I have no problem paying a monthly fee -- even sporadically, as I do with WoW. So it's not that the model itself is invalid, it's just that right now, there's still a lot of interest in WoW, and people can only give so much time to an MMO; of course one title will get the lion's share.
People talk all the time about what's going to 'kill' World of Warcraft, as if it were that cut-and-dried. Age of Conan looks amazing, and Warhammer Online expects to trade on its horde of adherents who love the franchise. Add to that the murmurs I keep hearing now and then that people are starting to get tired of Azeroth, and we're looking at a new year containing the possibility of WoW's audience finally splitting their subscription dollar.
And what about Blizzard's upcoming, unannounced title? Conventional wisdom has it that splitting your fanbase by introducing a new title is madness before exhausting the value of the old title. So, is that a cue that Blizzard might be moving away from investing all their current development resources in WoW, and redirecting them to the new one? Azeroth only has so many unexplored continents after all, and with the Wrath of the Lich King on the horizon, that's one more piece of geography gone, and one more act in the lore accounted for.
One of the reasons WoW is so polished is because Blizzard's got the money to do it right. They have that money because people vote with their dollars. However, nothing lasts forever. Someday WoW will be supplanted by something that does all the things WoW does, whatever that might be. I'm convinced that when that game comes, people will be lining up to pay for the privilege of playing it.
