What SHOULD a WOW subscription price be?

[glowpipe]

The current price is fine, they just need to get their heads out of their arses and add content to match the price

Not a single one of you is going to keep playing wow if they make it free. Thats something i can almost guarantee you. The millions they are now losing from lost sub fees will have to be recouped elsewhere. And what other way is there for them to recoup it ? ding ding ding. Cash shop. Instead of a patch with 47 new mounts you can get doing content, you get 5 new generic mounts and the rest put into the store. They will start selling transmogs (Yes, they already have sold a few now, but now every single item would be put in the store instead, and the raids would give you generic low quality items, so you want to buy a new one instead of using the mog you already have) and probably start with premium features. Like paying to upgrade your gear instead of using valor. The game will be designed around making money in the ingame store. And thats a game non of us wants

[Cracked]

realistically it should probably be $10 every time they release a major content patch. otherwise big fat $0. at least that would be some motivation to actually release good content on time

[Utrrabbit]

If you can not afford 15/month or 20/month (I pay 20 due to being Canadian and dollar excange) than you need to seriously reevalue your life choices.

That money equates to maybe 1 meal at mcdonalds or a single medium pizza. If you are so broke you cam not even pay that;, it is not the games fault or the subs fault. You need to learn to better control your money or get a better job.

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The current price is fine, they just need to get their heads out of their arses and add content to match the price

Not a single one of you is going to keep playing wow if they make it free. Thats something i can almost guarantee you. The millions they are now losing from lost sub fees will have to be recouped elsewhere. And what other way is there for them to recoup it ? ding ding ding. Cash shop. Instead of a patch with 47 new mounts you can get doing content, you get 5 new generic mounts and the rest put into the store. They will start selling transmogs (Yes, they already have sold a few now, but now every single item would be put in the store instead, and the raids would give you generic low quality items, so you want to buy a new one instead of using the mog you already have) and probably start with premium features. Like paying to upgrade your gear instead of using valor. The game will be designed around making money in the ingame store. And thats a game non of us wants

This kind of thinking always makes me cringe, the part of lost subs. People are still of the belief that they have lost so many subs. The last post they made about season of mastery indicated that they currently have 44mil subs between retail and classic and tbc. They said in the post "our 44 mil users"

[glowpipe]

If you can not afford 15/month or 20/month (I pay 20 due to being Canadian and dollar excange) than you need to seriously reevalue your life choices.

That money equates to maybe 1 meal at mcdonalds or a single medium pizza. If you are so broke you cam not even pay that;, it is not the games fault or the subs fault. You need to learn to better control your money or get a better job.

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This kind of thinking always makes me cringe, the part of lost subs. People are still of the belief that they have lost so many subs. The last post they made about season of mastery indicated that they currently have 44mil subs between retail and classic and tbc. They said in the post "our 44 mil users"

Oh jesus. And if the game removes the sub fee and go free to play. They still gonna that money from the subs ?

[TrollHunter3000]

MTX > Sub fee. One sub might pay for a few race changes, maybe a character boost, few wow tokens and offset 20-30 subs that they lose.

TBC Classic 'dark portal passes' at launch alone would've printed more money than any sub is going to bring them.

Subs don't mean shit now. That's why they don't publish them

Not sure how you can know that without knowing sub numbers. It's just speculation on your part.

[|Dexter|]

Proudmoore NA US., not the LGBTQ chosen server, it's always well-populated maybe you log in at a bad time or something but this server got a ton of people on it always!

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I used to think the price was fine. But now that you only get a patch maybe once every 6 months.. well.. not so much. You basically pay a AAA game price for MAYBE a patch anymore. A patch that usually does deliver on a raid but usually fails on some trumped up system and trash pack of other things that they have to correct in the X.X.5 patch 6 months later anyway. While they still ask you to buy a box. Still microtransaction you to death. At this point I think the sub needs to go. If they every start making patch content that happens at any regular cadence it suddenly is worth it to pay something like a subscription. But right now it just feels like you pay merely for the right to log in and nothing more. It has no premium.

[WinningOne]

Not at all, rather i would likely use less of all of them, and thus save quite a lot (relative to WoW's price anyhow).
My gaming computer costed about a thousand, my working laptop about 300, to give an idea of the savings. Granted i play some other games too, but they're often quite old and run just fine on the laptop as well.

Additionally WoW loses much of its replayability whenever it is shitty, making those added costs much higher per month if there is not enough interesting gameplay to keep one interested for more than a few months.

This is complete bollocks. The only money you spend on WoW that you wouldn't spent without the subscription is the monthly fee. You would still have the PC, your internet would still cost the same, and your electrical bill would stay the same because you'd be playing other games. Total bollocks. I'll never understand this need to make things seem worse than they are. If WoW is terrible then it's terrible and fake reasons don't have to be made up which justify disliking it.

[Accendor]

All what shit? The token, services and cosmetics?

You listed basically everything that is relevant in the game, so I am not sure what your question is here.
Remember, the token buys you every item, every PVP rating, every achivement etc. The only thing they can NOT get you are unavailable items and the items from the shop, but those you can buy.
So yeah, right now you can buy EVERYTHING thats in the game through the shop.

[psyquest]

I know that everyone here is willing to pay $15/month. (Aside from the gold token subscriptions.)

If you could wave a magic wand, what do you think a WoW subscription should be per month?

20 euros per month.

[jellmoo]

Honestly, MMO pricing should probably be adjusted to match market trends. The price hasn't fluctuated for like 20 years, With the advent of all the treaming services coming in at a much lower rate, and potentially offering more in terms of hourly content, it feels weird that MMOs still have a price per entry + a sub fee + mtx. The model feels outdated, and the price point seems off.

If the sub is something to stay, I think matching subscription rates with something like Netflix or Disney + would be a decent enough way to go.

[Hyeonh]

State of the game right now, i'd still feel ripped off if they made it free.

[ablib]

I know that everyone here is willing to pay $15/month. (Aside from the gold token subscriptions.)

If you could wave a magic wand, what do you think a WoW subscription should be per month?

$15 USD in 2004 dollars is about $22 today. So...$22.

The problem with the gaming industry, is games have roughly cost the same for the past 30-ish years, yet prices are never increasing. Games also cost a ton more to make now too than it did back in the day. Unfortunately, gamers, in general, are too dumb to understand this, so we get things like micro-transactions, instead of just normal price increases.

[Chilela]

$10/month.

While yes, inflation means that the game technically costs less to subscribe to than it did in previous years, the microtransactions added since launch have likely negated this change, and then some. The WoW Token in particular has more or less fostered a culture of having a relatively small pool of players who likely spend as much as a dozen Vanilla-type subs, if not moreso. Factor in that, mount store items, and character services, and it's fair to presume that at this point in time, sub fees are likely not as big of a part of the game's profits as people imagine. In an increasingly-competitive MMO market, a cut in base sub fees would likely be at least a neutral for Blizzard. They could levee it as good PR, which they could REALLY use at this point in time, potentially bring in some more players, thus creating a healthier-sized community, and potentially draw more big-time spenders in.

Also, the patch cycle of this expansion has been longer than previous ones so far, so a smaller sub fee would help alleviate the difference there as well.

[Takure]

Since the game is pay to win, should be $0 dollars.

$20 AUD to stand in Oribos. What a rip off.

[Th3Scourge]

Not sure how you can know that without knowing sub numbers. It's just speculation on your part.

You don't need to know sub numbers. Hell, not even shareholders know the sub numbers, they just say 'higher subscriber numbers', 'stronger engagement' or 'participation in value-added activities'

[InfernalDark]

50€ so it would banish poor people away like ruskies.

[Drusin]

Remember, the token buys you every item, every PVP rating, every achivement etc.

Well not "every" but I assume you mean things like KSM and AotC?

[jellmoo]

$15 USD in 2004 dollars is about $22 today. So...$22.

The problem with the gaming industry, is games have roughly cost the same for the past 30-ish years, yet prices are never increasing. Games also cost a ton more to make now too than it did back in the day. Unfortunately, gamers, in general, are too dumb to understand this, so we get things like micro-transactions, instead of just normal price increases.

I get what you're laying down here, but that covers the cost of the game, or say the expansions. IS there room to increase the price there? Maybe that does make sense. But the actual subscription? That's where it gets dicey. The state of online entertainment has changed dramatically since WoW launched. We have subscriptions for all sorts of things now, with internet speeds letting us do so much more than we could back then. We have to look at the value that something brings to us.

$22/month would imply that WoW brings 175% more value to a customer than something like Disney +. Personally, I don't think that's remotely true, but of course that is entirely subjective.

The world has changed and it's not only things like inflation or stagnant game pricing that needs to be factored in. We need to look at how our entertainment content is consumed and paid for to get an idea of what the real value of an MMO could be.

[WowIsDead64]

$15 USD in 2004 dollars is about $22 today. So...$22.

The problem with the gaming industry, is games have roughly cost the same for the past 30-ish years, yet prices are never increasing. Games also cost a ton more to make now too than it did back in the day. Unfortunately, gamers, in general, are too dumb to understand this, so we get things like micro-transactions, instead of just normal price increases.

Please provide some proofs, that development costs more today. But something beyond devs themselves saying it. They're prejudiced. Because, you know, modern development tools are more advanced, like modern engines (Unreal, etc.) and modern cloud servers are much more cheaper to maintain, than old physical blade servers. Overall it should always boil down to whether game worth this sub fee or not. Even if they invest more money into development of current game - we don't see any results. It really seems like current game is outsourced to some cheap Chinese or Indian developers.

Old Wow servers:

New Wow servers: