I’ve written about finishing World of Warcraft before, and I’ve written about business models more than a few times.
Alternative Chat has a good blog post up ruminating a bit on the potential that Blizzard has to take the existing World of Warcraft and blow it up, starting over with all the bits they want and jettisoning the cruft of the last decade. They did a version of this with the Cataclysm expansion, which I’ve also written about a few times.
So, I just wanted to put my finger in the stream again and post pretty much the same thing I noted in a comment over at Alt’s place, and something I’ve written here before…
If Blizzard really wants to shake things up and leave the old WoW behind for a brave new world, they should branch the game. Cut everything that’s presently in the game off from the dev teams (save for bug fixing), package it up as a “buy to play” subscriptionless game in the vein of Guild Wars, and bravely stride off into WoW 2.0 as their premiere flagship subscription game.
It’ll never happen, just like Vanilla servers won’t happen and Pre-Cataclysm servers won’t happen, but hey, I can dream.
Edited to add: This amuses me. As Jay over at The Rampant Coyote points out, “Buy Once and Play” is making a minor comeback. As if it’s something radical. This industry is weird. Even Forbes just can’t resist the satire.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
Blizzard always strikes me as a very optimistic company, very sure that the today is better than yesterday, and that tomorrow will be better than today. I can just picture Mike Morhaime being asked about a “classic” WoW server and just looking wide eyed, asking, “But why would anybody want that? The game today is so much better?”
It would be a fun experience to have vanilla WoW servers simply to see a large majority of the people that think WoW vanilla is something they want to play today realize that what they like was how vanilla was much better compared to the then existing alternatives.
Wilhelm, that’s a good way of looking at it, and I agree. They certainly don’t seem interested in looking backwards, and often seem befuddled by player desires.
GH, there’s certainly some rose-tinted nostalgia in play with desires for Vanilla servers, but there’s also demand.
I’d love to see a fork of World of Warcraft that allowed Blizzard to cater ever so slightly to two different audiences while sharing resources between them.
I am not so certain the public-at-large would value a WoW Prime and WoW 1.5, however. And, like Wilhelm above me, I don’t think Blizzard understands enough of what players want to ever effectively do something like this.
However, if we look at their last two new releases, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm (yes it’s still a closed beta, but you can buy into it so it might as well be a release) Blizz are heavily “experimenting” with microtransactions and it seems to be working out for them. We’ll have to see what Overwatch produces but a WoW 2.0 could be on the cards and be very different to the current model. Considering how every sub only MMO release in recent years has undergone F2P conversion, I cannot see anyone going with sub only again. It’s clearly not what people want.