World of Warcraft, is it surviving in a world of free play games.

Mostly everyone who games or knows someone who games has heard of World of Warcraft, most commonly referred to by players as WoW. This massively popular game, World of Warcraft was created in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment and has been a subscription based game since the beginning. Even though people must pay to play the game, it has been the most successful massively multiplayer online role-playing game(MMORPG) with close to 7.4 million subscriptions as of October 2014. Here are a list of current prices, depending on if you want a one month, three month or six month subscription. Blizzard also charges users for services such as name changes, character boosts, appearance changes, faction changes and name changes. They also offer specialty pets and mounts that are only available as an in store purchase. With all these costs associated with game play, plus the price to purchase the game, will Blizzard survive in a world with tons of emerging free play games?

With failing subscription numbers, people have been wondering if Blizzard will change to a free play business model for the game to gain back its usual high number of players. To put it in perspective, in the first quarter of 2013 they lost 14% of their players or an estimated 1.3 million subscriptions. Most of these lost subscribers are from China, where games such as League of Legends are becoming increasingly more popular. Blizzard has made it very clear that it does not plan to move to a free to play business model and is well aware that they will have a decline in the number of subscriptions in the coming years. On top of this, Blizzard has said that the paid services they offer are 100% optional and are not needed to play the game but are used to keep social stability and economic stability intact on each server. If people were allowed to change names, factions, races, or servers with no cost, there would be a severe decline in many of the servers economies and ability to stay active and alive. This is totally understandable if you play the game and understand how the servers work and operate.

In reality, World of Warcraft is old, ten years old and eventually people will get tired of it and search out better and newer games, this is the natural process of entertainment and Blizzard will have to keep this in mind for the next coming years. But last Thursday, November 13 Blizzard released what has said be the last expansion for the game, Warlords of Draenor. Thankfully this expansion has received better reviews than the disappointment that was Mists of Pandaria which may give a much needed boost in subscription levels for the next year or two. There doesn't seem to be anything World of Warcraft can do now besides see how subscription levels fall or rise while continually updating and working on the in game play and marketing itself as a game that is still hugely popular and one of the longest running MMORPGs in the world.

It will be sad to see WoW eventually fizzle out , but hopefully Blizzard has something new and exciting planned for us in the future.