Is the sub-based monthly model outdated?

[unbound]

The monthly sub stopped making sense once new content releases for WoW slowed to a drip after MoP.

QFT

This is the crux of the monthly sub fee issue. Blizz broke their promise regarding providing lots of content as part of that monthly sub fee. In fact, that was their argument over 10 years ago when people started questioning WoW's monthly sub fee.

[Soon-TM]

The sub is pricy and annoying cuzz sometimes you just wanna play a week or 2 of m+ and be gone, and that's one thing, but i can tolerate it if box price is gone. If you have to pay a big price upfront each expo AND pay sub its definitely too much.

I share this sentiment. B2P is OK, monthly fees not so much, but I can live with that - but the two things together are just overkill. Especially when you have a shop on top of that, which doesn't sell just cosmetics (that would be fine, in principle) but it also allows you to legally buy gold, which translates into a myriad of other issues.

[czarek]

Im just glad they did not add inflation tax on in Its outdated ofc. It should be season pass with some extra staff like monut/transmog xp boost or smth like this. For a both retail/classic. They could just slipt it or combine with a few ticket passes.

[potis]

The sub is pricy and annoying cuzz sometimes you just wanna play a week or 2 of m+ and be gone, and that's one thing, but i can tolerate it if box price is gone. If you have to pay a big price upfront each expo AND pay sub its definitely too much.

And its exactly why the box price is going up, and why they cockblock everything by 2-3 weeks, so you expansion hoppers get scammed for a second and third month, they aint stupid.

The revenue is all the returning game-ruiner-hoppers, it aint the guys that play the game.

Best part is how they (dont take it personally, all you posters do) pretend they only pay the box +1 month, and 3 tokens, and 2 characters transfers, and a character boost.

Thats why despite lower sub numbers, revenue is up, and i am okay with that.

[reemi]

The monthly sub is a good way to filter the trash people we don't want in the game.

Yes its outdated, but I like it.

[Roflfaceroll]

The sub is pricy and annoying cuzz sometimes you just wanna play a week or 2 of m+ and be gone, and that's one thing, but i can tolerate it if box price is gone. If you have to pay a big price upfront each expo AND pay sub its definitely too much.

$15 is pricey? Compared to what? Most battlepass systems start at $20 and with the route blizz has currently been taking that isnt the premium battle pass so $40. If they did go the route of f2p=free to pay they will probably keep it at a monthly basis. So $20-40 that you have to spend time to earn what you could have already done in the $15 sub.

This model doesn't make the game better. It is an illusion that reduces what you can do and makes you pay out the ass for everything.

Before you say it is pricey stop. Take a moment and figure the math of how much you would spend vs $15/month.

[Trumpcat]

The only outdated thing about the subscription is its low cost that has never been adjusted, bar minimal region currency policies. Today $15 isn't the same as $15 in 2005, and that shows in expansion budgets which seem to cut corners wherever possible. I don't feel like we are getting a premium product anymore, but I also don't feel like we are paying premium either.

I actually pay less than 15, since I have the 6 month sub so it's even cheaper. A menu at burger king is more expensive. I'd pay more if it meant more content and quality design.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

WoW is leaps and bounds better as a MMO than any other non-subscription based MMO.

[Roflfaceroll]

The only outdated thing about the subscription is its low cost that has never been adjusted, bar minimal region currency policies. Today $15 isn't the same as $15 in 2005, and that shows in expansion budgets which seem to cut corners wherever possible. I don't feel like we are getting a premium product anymore, but I also don't feel like we are paying premium either.

I actually pay less than 15, since I have the 6 month sub so it's even cheaper. A menu at burger king is more expensive. I'd pay more if it meant more content and quality design.

Retail stopped being premium product after activision started forcing their hand in blizzard after wotlk and since diablo 3 came out. Check out this article where the one of the leads of diablo 3 talks about it. https://www.google.com/amp/s/happyga...-water-108030/

[VMSmith]

$15/month is piddling. It's trivial.

US minimum wage is, what, $7.25/hour? If you play just 2 and a fraction hours a month the value of your time is already greater than the sub cost. And most players play FAR more than two hours a month.

Right here you show that you have no concept of what it's like living on a minimum-wage job.

Sure, two and a half hours is enough to cover a WoW sub for someone in such a job. But you know what else that two and a half hours covers ...? One 60th of their rent, which is a damn sight more important than a WoW sub.

It's even worse for many people in a lot of European countries.

[Tyris Flare]

$15/month is piddling. It's trivial.

US minimum wage is, what, $7.25/hour? If you play just 2 and a fraction hours a month the value of your time is already greater than the sub cost. And most players play FAR more than two hours a month..

In many places McDonalds/Dunkin etc pay $20 an hour now, meanwhile sub costs for these games haven't changed in 20+ years.

Also as people have said, f2p means you are relying on whales, which means developers are incentivized to put in as much whale bait as possible. Whatever people think about the token, the Wow shop is a nothingburger compared to most games.

- - - Updated - - -

Right here you show that you have no concept of what it's like living on a minimum-wage job.

Sure, two and a half hours is enough to cover a WoW sub for someone in such a job. But you know what else that two and a half hours covers ...? One 60th of their rent, which is a damn sight more important than a WoW sub.

It's even worse for many people in a lot of European countries.

Why is a company selling a product obligated to provide entertainment for people on min wage jobs? This isn't like having power or internet, it is definitionally a luxury.

If someone can't afford it, they don't play.

[agentsi]

I think $15 a month is too cheap honestly. I'd rather pay $30 a month, if that means they'd update the game more often, give us more content, and balance the PvE and PvP skills/mechanics better/more often.

With the amount of inflation going on since WoW was released in 2004, $15 a month isn't a lot of money. If you play for 15 hours at minimum, that's $1 for an hour of entertainment, where else can you play a game for that cheap? And we all know most of us who play, don't play for 30 mins or less per day in a month.

The reality is, if $15 a month is too much money that it breaks your budget, I understand and sympathize with you. But you should be doing more to fix that situation than playing a video game for hours on end. 1 Hour of your life could easily pay for the game you're wanting to play. Even for a teenager, earning $15 isn't a big deal, if you want it.

[Roflfaceroll]

Right here you show that you have no concept of what it's like living on a minimum-wage job.

Sure, two and a half hours is enough to cover a WoW sub for someone in such a job. But you know what else that two and a half hours covers ...? One 60th of their rent, which is a damn sight more important than a WoW sub.

It's even worse for many people in a lot of European countries.

True true, rent is out of control. You should check into the lawsuit against realpage and their yieldstar software. There is a huge antitrust lawsuit going on stating that their software has been artificially inflating rent prices by performing collusion with landlords data and telling them to keep raising rent because even if they lose tenants they would make up the difference and some from those willing to pay it. Just because they aren't directly colluding and using software to do it doesnt make it right. That on top of air b&b taking rental properties and covid. Air b&b is massively crashing right now and I hope it is completely destroyed.

[Osmeric]

Right here you show that you have no concept of what it's like living on a minimum-wage job.

Sure, two and a half hours is enough to cover a WoW sub for someone in such a job. But you know what else that two and a half hours covers ...? One 60th of their rent, which is a damn sight more important than a WoW sub.

It's even worse for many people in a lot of European countries.

I have a concept of what it's like living on a minimum wage job. Money is very tight. In that situation, spending your time playing a game, rather than earning even more money, is inflicting a huge opportunity cost on yourself. And that's true even if the game is free. The $15/month changes this hardly at all.

[Shadowferal]

I have a concept of what it's like living on a minimum wage job. Money is very tight. In that situation, spending your time playing a game, rather than earning even more money, is inflicting a huge opportunity cost on yourself. And that's true even if the game is free. The $15/month changes this hardly at all.

*nods*
Where I am, even were min wage were raised to $15/hr it's still too much. But that cost has far less to do with the subscription price and far more to do with inflated prices of basic living costs.
With that in mind, I find a $15 subscription price very reasonable.

[hulkgor]

Trivial amount for the entertainment value, in my experience.

I do have concerns about their triple dipping though. Box sale, monthly sub AND a shop for cosmetics and services (faction, race and server changes). The services are absolutely overpriced.

[Soikona]

I pay £30 a month for the gym, £10 for WoW and another £10 for gamepass. I don’t think sub is outdated, I just think what I get for the £10 is lacking, but the only raiding alternative game is FF14 and as great as it is gameplay, it’s just too weeb for me. Considering I can play FF14 for £8 for a one toon, which is my style, I find WoW to be over priced.

On that, £10 a month is fuck all. I don’t go to the cinema anymore so that money goes there.

[Relapses]

Trivial amount for the entertainment value, in my experience.

I do have concerns about their triple dipping though. Box sale, monthly sub AND a shop for cosmetics and services (faction, race and server changes). The services are absolutely overpriced.

They're overpriced to prevent abuse. This is probably less of an issue these days but it absolutely was a bigger issue back in the days when realm identity mattered.

[Linkedblade]

Greg Street, one of wow's ex developers who left WoW after the MoP expansion (i think) has said the sub based model is outdated for mmo's. It's a barrier for entry for new players because there are some days when you only want to play WoW for few hours but in order to do that, you are forced to pay 15 bucks for a sub. There are times where you are not playing wow for weeks so that's money ends up being wasted.

He's working on the new mmo game for Riot so we have to see how successful that game is but do you agree with his statement?. He plans to mainly make money from cosmetic items from the ingame shop e.g. weapon skins, hero skins, mounts etc while the game stays Free to Play.

Riots in a position where they can take some loss on a game if it were to be F2P. They're definitely going to profit off of other things like merch and increased appeal to play LoL.

I think $15/month or $78/6 months is a bit high. They should have a year pass for $70, make it the same as a single console game. Because if you're going to get hundreds of hours out of the game it's worth at least that. I think it's also egregious to have a subscription, paid expansions and a cash shop. That's a bit much. All the content in the game should be included in the subscription. Services like name change and server transfers are stupid. There's no reason to have realm/servers anymore at all. Switch character names to <Name><unique ID> similar to battle tags. And the same thing for quilds, that solves the multiplicity of such things.

[Adamas102]

Nah WoW is still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment out there. A 90 minute movie at the theater is 15 bucks, while a sub lasts a whole month.

Or alternatively, it's one of if not THE most expensive video game ever. I stopped paying the sub fee when the token started taking care of that but that still means I shelled out over $2,000 just to play WoW from vanilla through to WoD (just on sub and box costs). Even though individually it almost certainly has the highest play time of all my games, I'm sure it's considerably less than my total playtime for my next top 10 games combined which definitely cost less than $2,000.

Also, why is the movie theater example the ONLY one that people ever bring up? Are most WoW players only aware of video games and movies as avenues of entertainment? There are plenty of cheaper hobbies than WoW out there if you branch out beyond this super narrow scope.

Have you seen how bat shit crazy people go when Blizzard add a cosmetic to the store? imagine if wow goes f2p and all the cool shit costs 10 bucks a pop.

Well, people who are good paying the sub fee would have an extra $160 per year to spend on cosmetics if that were the case. Seems like a better deal since they'd be able to actually pick and choose what they want to spend their money on instead of needing to pay the sub and then still seeing cosmetics being put in the store. Meanwhile people who aren't willing to pay the sub might still spend $10 here and there if they can play the game for free.