OK, I’ve floated this idea before, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one, but between Pete finding his sweet spot and this rumination on the fate of “vanilla” WoW (it’s not going anywhere, it’s not changing), I figured it’s time to bring it up again.
Dear Blizzard, if you can’t get past the subscription model, please gradate your pricing as follows:
$5/month for vanilla WoW
$10/month for vanilla WoW + The Burning Crusade
$15/month for vanilla WoW + TBC + Wrath of the Lich King
If you can’t wean yourself off the subscription model, at least pay attention and realize that a segmented market is building in the blue ocean that you’re leaving alone in the short session casual arena. Peggle for purples doesn’t cut it. Of course, you could do better by offering vanilla WoW as a Guild Wars-like purchase ($30 box price, free play forever), or by offering prorated subscriptions based on time actually played with a cap at the “regular” sub price.
People do wonder… what *are* we paying for? In a wonky economy, that question has a tendency to come up more often.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
Big agree. Better yet…Vanilla WoW = FREE.
I would honestly not question a single support issue if they did this.
Blizzard is really just greedy, and their length of time in the field, and no cheaper option shows this. Yet, people continue to pay…thus why complain about “Bunny Ears” if you don’t even care you are getting ripped off..
Sad.
Let me take a puritan stance on this: Resist the temptation and simply do not play WoW! 🙂
BTW, did you notice how he mentioned “Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, Scarlet Monastery” as the fun instances up to level 60? Not too many, actually!
I see it coming, soon people can pay in the shop to get a decently geared level 60/70/80 character. Maybe already with the next expansion, who knows.
They have already accelerated the levelling process, the ore smelting process, fishing, basically all professions… just to move people closer to the point where they actually have the most trouble: The one and only true game in the game, the endgame.
Maybe they should give players more things to play around with than daily quests and raiding.
[…] 13, 2009 by Syp I’ll do Tesh one better — I think Blizzard should make vanilla/classic/Old World WoW free to […]
Openedge1, I’m all for opening vanilla WoW as a free park. I’ve actually argued for it before. I’m just using this 5/10/15 as a sort of “soft sell” notion to those who can’t let go of their subs.
I wouldn’t question their support that way either. In fact, considering the level of support they presently *do* offer the old world, I’d say they are already treating it as a free game, if not a roadblock to their “live” content. Monetizing it the same way as the cutting edge content is annoying and more than a little dishonest.
Longasc, well, sure, you could always not play. 😉 I haven’t played since the last free trial I did almost six months ago. I’ve never paid to play WoW, and until it offers fair value for my money, I will not pay to play.
Yes, I did note that he didn’t have a huge list of old world “fun” locations. That does concern me a bit, but not a lot, because I suspect that’s filtered through the raiding view. I’m the sort that actually just plays the game to play it, and raiding (and most group content) doesn’t interest me much. Still, that definitely brings your last sentence into sharp focus. There most definitely does need to be more to play around with rather than daily quests and raiding. Nicely stated. I am baffled by the focus on the endgame, as it’s perhaps the most obvious grind in the whole system, with the smallest incremental rewards.
I think that offering “prepackaged endcapped” characters is more or less inevitable with the expansion business model… but that again underlines that the bulk of the “game” just isn’t something that Blizzard themselves see as worth playing… but are willing to take our money for. That will never sit well with me.
$15 is a bargain for what you get even if you only play for a few hours a week. If you are playing so little that it doesn’t seem worthwhile, quitting is definitely the right move.
Regardless, you have a good point about pricing models, Tesh. Blizz could do even better if they noticed the market segmentation going on and instituted some more dynamic pricing models. And frankly vanilla WoW should be totally free. Keep the monthly fee, but stop charging for the initial purchase of the game, IMO.
Notably, Hatch, I never started, aside from the free trials. I can make my $15 go further by buying a used copy of FFTA2 or the like. As in, waaaaaay farther.
That’s the point of a segmented market. People find value at different points of the price curve. Blizzard could afford to maintain the flat $15 while their competition was EQ/EQ2, and even when WAR and AoC hit the field. Free Realms, Wizard101 and Runes of Magic are changing things, though, and Blizzard is risking playing catch up. At the moment, they are the clear numerical leader, but as Sony and Microsoft found out, the tortoise can beat the hare.
In other words, there’s no imminent, immediate threat, but the landscape of the market is changing. That should be addressed, and this is one way to do it. It’s not the only way, since yes, they could make vanilla WoW free (I lean that way) or try some other scheme. Doing nothing, however, is conceding ground that they need not concede.
I think Blizzard is actually going the other way, and providing every means possible to push people to the endgame as quickly as possible.
Check out Zardoz’s new data for level demographics:
http://armorydatamine.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/moar-content-plz/
There’s a ton more people at 80 by percentage than there were were at the beginning of the year:
http://armorydatamine.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/azeroths-baby-booms/
Bliz is specifically moving people out of that content as fast as possible, which is a decision I agree with. If you try to start playing, say DAoC these days, it’ll be quite some time before you even find anyone else to play with, as they’re all at the level cap, but you can’t get there quickly.
Moving new players through the game quickly is a smart move, so that players can be with their friends. Also, Blizzard would have to actually provide new content for the old zones if they had players clumping up in the lower levels. This way they can spend all their resources on the zones people are actually in.
All the rest of those zones are just to make leveling alts less boring at this point.
Aye, but that underlines one of my major problems with DIKU design. It’s almost a “scorched earth” mentality, where the player base (and dev attention) goes to the newest, shiniest stuff after strip mining the old content. I’m looking for sustainable design, both as a player and as a dev.
As a player, I want to see new and interesting things, sure, but I also want to know that I can go to familiar places and still have fun *playing* the game. As a dev, I want to make the most out of my resources, and actively promoting players chewing through content is antithetical to that notion. To date, MMO devs have tried to make the treadmills more attractive with loot, achievements and alt-generating mechanics, but that’s one step above phoning in your work. If the world itself can be dynamic and interesting to players of any stripe, at any point, in any location, you don’t need to keep upping the level cap and making new raids.
Still, if we’re going to assume that Blizzard wants people to play together in their vaunted endgame (the biggest treadmill of the design), why have the old world at all? Let people buy their way directly to the endgame.
And let those who want to play in the old world do so, without gouging them. The assets are there, why let them rot in obscurity?
Let me reurgitate what we already discussed in Muckbeast’s blog:
Each expansion makes the % of viable content smaller. OK, besides the overall % we can compare the zones and dungeons provided by each expansion. Northrend had bigger zones, but fewer dungeons. But both Outland and Northrend are small compared to the content and size of the “Old World”.
Kalimdor, Azeroth… ride through the continent from north to south, it will take some time.
Nobody gives a damn about the old low level content, that’s it.
But… this is even funnier… each expansion does not give you MORE of the SAME, but LESS of the SAME.
Despite some increased quality material, interesting quests and so on, there were fewer instances in WOTLK than in TBC, and nobody should dare to compare that to levelling up from 1-60.
Really, people HAD tons of fun till level 60 and even longer – now the “10 more levels” burn out so incredibly much faster, and even faster for a veteran player audience.
Very true, Longasc. The extensions to the treadmill are flirting with the law of diminishing returns.
The problem with this is Joneses’ Syndrome. A system like that would last without player complaints as long as it takes for the first person to realize they got vanilla WoW, and all the friends or family they play with are doing TBC or LK content and he can’t join them.
So what’s the point of setting up a tiered price structure that you -know- will eventually heavily tend to all players simply going for the highest tier as soon as they hit the end of their content. Just offer the highest tier at a competitive price point (which they are doing, even if they’ve always sat at the highest end of that price point) and be done with it; ensure all players have equal access to the game, save yourself headaches and everyone is relatively happy.
This is all a bit of a moot point in any case: Blizzard is not going to touch WoW much at all (if ever). Internally they’ve moved to other things and are quite content to leave the cash cow as it is until those new things are done and the bulk of their customers move on to the new things. Which makes a lot of sense: WoW is gonna be five years old soon, and in all honesty doesn’t realistically have more than two expansions in it. Three would be pushing it. Just enough to keep it going until the new things are ready, so why mess majorly with it?
I’m not saying I entirely agree with all this from a player’s perspective, but from a developer or even business point of view it makes a lot of sense.
does that mean I could pay 10 bucks a month if I promise to never go to the outlands?
I need the AH (vanilla) and Wrath (raids), and… that’s about it!
Sounds good to me, Ix. Considering they made you have TBC to even play Wrath, though, I don’t think it would work that way. (Though it should; the expansions don’t really interweave enough to make Wrath depend on TBC.)
Julian, the “keeping up with the Joneses” is part of the selling point, actually. It’s an impetus to “upgrade”, while still allowing market segmentation. Some people actually don’t care about the Joneses.
As far as “knowing” that people will eventually go to the end, I don’t know that, and in fact, I’ve heard more than once about demand for “classic” servers with just vanilla WoW. Those people would be well served by their temperance, resisting the Blizzard design to push on to the endgame. Some players just like alts, and playing through low level areas for the fun of it.
As much as Blizzard and most elitist players would like us to think, there are people who would play the old world at a bargain price.
Beyond that, another major point of this plan is to compete with the upstarts on price. If you, as a player, could spend $5/month on Free Realms or WoW, which would be more likely? Maybe both, even? Throw Wizard 101 in there for another $10, and you’ve almost made your own “Station Pass”.
As for laziness making a lot of sense from a dev/business standpoint, that’s exactly what I’m arguing against. Players see that, and move on. If Blizzard wants to stay relevant in the emerging markets, not just their bulwark addiction base, they need to pay attention to the customers who *aren’t* happy with the $15 flatline.
[…] Tesh posted an article entitled Five Dollar Vanilla WoW. He makes a valid point that given the current real world economic slump and given the fact that […]
“Julian, the “keeping up with the Joneses” is part of the selling point, actually. It’s an impetus to “upgrade”, while still allowing market segmentation. Some people actually don’t care about the Joneses.
As far as “knowing” that people will eventually go to the end, I don’t know that, and in fact, I’ve heard more than once about demand for “classic” servers with just vanilla WoW. Those people would be well served by their temperance, resisting the Blizzard design to push on to the endgame. Some players just like alts, and playing through low level areas for the fun of it.
As much as Blizzard and most elitist players would like us to think, there are people who would play the old world at a bargain price.”
Of course. There will always be, and that’s fine. But what you need to keep in mind here is the cost/benefit of doing all this (from Blizzard’s point of view) and if the section of their playerbase, or former playerbase, that would truly go for something like this is large enough to make it worthwhile.
I don’t think it is. Blizzard of course moves in slower cycles, but they must have realized it isn’t as well, because they’ve had almost five years in which to make changes to their pricing structure, but nothing was done.
We can interpret this as being lazy, which is a valid opinion. But I interpret it as why mess with something that isn’t broken just because <%5 of the playerbase demands it (and let's be honest here, it can't be more than that). If it was critical to sustain the game or if the demand for something like this was more massive, it would have been done years ago.
"Beyond that, another major point of this plan is to compete with the upstarts on price. If you, as a player, could spend $5/month on Free Realms or WoW, which would be more likely? Maybe both, even? Throw Wizard 101 in there for another $10, and you’ve almost made your own “Station Pass”."
But that's looking at things in a vacuum. Yes, once whatever game goes live in any market WoW is in, technically that's competition, but that's about it. I'm hard-pressed to think off the top of my head what has Blizzard done in almost 5 years of WoW that could be seen as direct competitive reaction to whatever someone else has been doing. The only thing I can think of is the introduction of achievements which could -kinda- be traced back to LOTRO, but that's about. Blizzard doesn't set out to compete with others; others set out to compete with Blizzard, which isn't the same thing.
Of course when we talk about "the players" voting with their wallets and preferring the less expensive offer it makes sense because it's basic economics. But these "players' are not neutral and their decision processes are heavily influenced by many other factors. I think it's great that Free Realms got a million players, but we both know these aren't a million players they stole from WoW. I'm sure there's a cross-section there, but I don't think it's nearly as large as we think, nor will it last as long as we hope.
I'm not licking Blizzard's boots here, I'm simply saying that if there's one thing they have shown is that they do their homework and they aren't stupid: If they felt threatened by other games coming out at a cheaper monthly sub, they would have adapted.
They've been running the #1 MMO of its kind for four years straight. Everybody said $15 was too expensive, and yet people fell over backwards to give them that money. Everybody said the game wasn't hardcore enough to make it in the long run, yet it's still there and people are not leaving en masse. Everybody said LOTRO was going to be the great WoW-killer alternative; it wasn't. Barely made a dent. Everybody said either Warhammer or Conan was going to kill it; those made an even lesser dent. And so on.
So forgive me for thinking they have provided ample proof that they know what they're doing.
"As for laziness making a lot of sense from a dev/business standpoint, that’s exactly what I’m arguing against. Players see that, and move on. If Blizzard wants to stay relevant in the emerging markets, not just their bulwark addiction base, they need to pay attention to the customers who *aren’t* happy with the $15 flatline."
I disagree somewhat. I think we have a great deal of evidence that points to players clearly no "seeing that and moving on". Of course WoW loses and gains players like any other game, but I seriously doubt when players go to cancel their sub the reason they massively pick "I don't like the subscription model or the price". They quit for far more important reasons than that.
Blizzard does want to stay relevant, it would be foolish of them as a company no to want that, but they won't do with with WoW. One, because they are already #1 and relevant. Two, because it's a four-year old game with an established feel and an established playerbase. Nothing you should be tinkering with just because you're feeling creative. Three, because they have proven that at least when it comes to WoW, they got 4 years of being #1 at that price point, against all competition and regardless of economic climate. It's not about being lazy. It could simply be that in this case, given the evidence, no change is needed in this area.
Blizzard is going to stay relevant with their next games, not with WoW. WoW is done. If they're going to experiment, they'll do it with the next batch, not with this. And I'm not even sure they're gonna touch the pricepoint. The next game is gonna sell just like WoW did, pretty much at whatever price they set it to within reason, regardless of competition price. They might lose some players, but not that many.
The price of the monthly sub (even now considering the recession) was a major issue years ago. Not anymore. While there will always be choices, and that's great in my book, the majority of the market has clearly shown it's more than happy to pay a flat $15 for a good game.
[…] 2009-05-25: Tesh let me know that I’m not the only one with an opinion on WoW pricing, here’s Wolfshead’s reaction and there are some other […]
Aaaaand now Best Buy has the original WoW on sale for $5. That’s sort of close…
I do really wonder if we’ll see a business model change with Cataclysm.
[…] up the pricing of their flagship World of Warcraft, perhaps it’s time again to float my Five Dollar Vanilla article, or a new variant: the Ratcheted Subscription model. (Note, expansions will still need to […]