World of Warcraft Originally Planned to be Free

Gamasutra has posted some coverage of Rob Pardo’s keynote at the Paris GDC, in which the Blizzard Entertainment senior vice president commented that World of Warcraft was originally going to be advertising supported.

So, how about community? World Of Warcraft has created a massive, vibrant one. How do you do it? Pardo noted: “The first step is to really have a great game, which isn’t necessarily what anybody wants to hear. There’s been a lot of talks at GDC about using web tools, and Facebook and MySpace and all these things.”

“All those things are great, but ultimately you have to make a great game. I think that if you hire all these people, and try to do all these marketing things to draw people in, ultimately that will draw time away from making that game. But if you make a great game, there are things you can do afterwards to support a community.”

But how about the move to free-to-play worldwide when it comes to online games? Pardo explained of the knock-on effect: “It affects us quite a bit. We’ve been successful in Asia for 10 or 11 years now, so we’re more savvy with the Asian business models than most. But what’s difficult for us is that what’s acceptable and popular in Asia is so different from the rest. We’re a global company. And it works very well over in Asia, but not so well over here. And subscriptions work great here, but not so well in Asia. It’s really hard to make something that works in both places.”

He elaborated: “If you make it subscription here, and free to play in Korea, that doesn’t work, because it’s a global community, and the other regions wouldn’t like it, because everyone knows what everyone’s doing. And the game design might not support it.”

Interestingly, Pardo commented on this subject: (When were first going to make World of Warcraft, we wanted to make it free and advertising supported.)

However, the Blizzard exec noted: (We didn’t want to charge a subscription, but as we researched market conditions, we realized that wouldn’t support us.)

Had they went with free-to-play, it would have costed the company billions. Who would have thought?