World of Warcraft Originally Free, Ad-Supported

At the Game Developers Conference in Paris (dutifully covered by Gamasutra), Jamil Moledina, executive director of the event, sat down with Blizzard senior vice president of game design Rob Pardo to talk about all things Blizzard. Pardo mentioned initial plans were to make World of Warcraft "free and advertise supported." He later noted, "We didn’t want to charge subscriptions, but as we researched market conditions, we realized that wouldn’t support us."

Given over 10 million people currently subscribe to WoW and pay a subscription fee -- varying between $12.99 and $14.99 per month depending on the plan -- it’s impossible to imagine Blizzard would be pulling in as much money had they taken the ad-supported route.

In the same discussion, Pardo pointed to the "lack of hard drive space and difficulty in certifying patches" as one of the major issues keeping MMOs from consoles, also noting, "another problem is that they want a piece of the subscription."

Credits: SYN Chandler XL, 1UP