GamersFirst welcomes World of Warcraft to 'the free-to-play revolution'

@Dunraven I don't really think that for a second, blizzard has had great success with their business model. Unlimited free trial is just a good way to hook those last few holdouts that haven't really delved into wow.

@Dunraven

At 10 million times 15 dollars a month. Blizzard would have to be completely insane to go f2p. The game is a massive cash cow.

@Zethe Don't underestimate the power of the cash shop, and if the rumors are true and global subs are down to 10 mil that is the largest decrease of subs ever in any mmo and it happen in less than six months.

That if fail of unheard of proportions.

@Dunraven

This makes no indication of them going f2p. How many p2p games have these? loads.

Wow still has more subs than all the MMORPG sub games combined.

@Dunraven

I wouldn't shake Bobby's hand if I was him. The last person that shook hands with him had all his success and credibility stolen from him after his company got absorbed into Kotick's company. I feel kinda bad for Mike actually, but eh, we warned him. Now he's just a peon that reports to a Kotick Yesman after internal restructuring.

Bobby Kotick is a pretty weird name though. I always figured when he came back to Earth and plunged it into chaos, he'd come back with a witty name, like Louis Cypher...

@Dril We all know DEMOs sucks.

@Viiral

Dude, Blizzard is just extending the free trial of WoW by an inch. It's still just a demo.

@Dril - Yeah, the definition of "F2P" varies wildly these days. Some games are mostly free to play. Others are cut offs at the 1/3rd into the game mark or so. Still others give you 5% of the game, and call themselves F2P. They give you as little as possible and try to call them F2P to get people to come try them. We need to come up with classifications where we can actually list the games correctly.

As a side note, GamersFirst did not introduce F2P here in the West nor did they popularize it. They were not the first. They were not the company that made it viable and popular (those two are different companies, neither had anything to do with GamersFirst however). This guy tooting his own horn welcoming Blizzard, it's just silly, as in relative terms GamersFirst is actually quite new to the F2P party themselves.

@Valius since the free to play market is so awfully craptastic that they have to claim nonexistent victories to have something to cheer about

@Softserve Point being that these companies don't have much more to fear from WOW than they ever did.

@Yellowdancer Don't be too sure it is rumored that WoW has lost a hell of a lot more than was reported, and remember this is the guy that axed Rockband because of a few months of poor performance.

@Dunraven

Even if WoW would actually have only 5M, why should Blizzard lose guaranteed 45M $/month to join the F2P wagon?
Existing P2P games went F2P because they were doing so few money that their only chance to survive was trying to attract new players with the word "free" and hope for some fast money.
For example, when LotRO devels told "since we went F2P, we tripled our incomes", they were considering the initial amount of money (maybe even big) new players spent to buy classes, races, dungeons...
But after 6 months, were they spending the same amount or they already bought everything they were interested in and continued to play for free?