The project code-named Titan is changing direction completely, Blizzard said on today’s Activision earnings call. It used to be a subscription-based massively multiplayer online game. No more.
“We’re in the process of selecting a new direction,” Blizzard president Mike Morhaime said on the call.
Titan, which has been under development for quite some time now, was overhauled a few months ago. Morhaime said they moved members of the Titan team to other games in other franchises, like Diablo and the upcoming MOBA Blizzard All-Stars.
No word on whether Titan will now be free-to-play or an entirely different type of game, but Blizzard seems to have realised that the age of the subscription-based MMORPG is over. (Although World of Warcraft still has a solid 7.7 million subscribers, according to Blizzard’s tracking.)
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15 responses to “Blizzard’s Next Subscription MMO Is No Longer A Subscription MMO”
I knew the RMAH in D3 was a Beta for the next Blizzard MMO.
It will be F2P, or at least single purchase, and be supported by an ingame RMAH, or a real money store (ala Hats), or a combination of both.
Blizzard already sell mounts and pets in WoW, and now they’re actually selling “hats”.
Microtransactioned up the ass is the term you’re looking for
Please Blizzard, pleeeease make it free to play in the style of Guild Wars 2: The cash shop is unobtrusive and does not take away from the game experience. It hardly feels like a free to play game. I can’t play the Lord of the Rings Online because it ‘feels’ like a free to play game to me.
Not to be pedantic, but GW2 isn’t free to play, it’s a one-off purchase. I would assume that that is why they can get away with not having an intrusive/pay-to-win micro transaction system. God damn I need to start playing more GW2…
Couldn’t agree more about LotRO. It felt…cheap, I guess?
That’s exactly it, it really does feel cheap. I guess Guild Wars 2 isn’t like other free to play models, but I hope whatever Titan turns out to be is more like Guild Wars 2 than LotRO 😛
Not disputing your thoughts but there are reasons behind that. LotRO probably feels cheaper for a couple of reasons. One being it was released 5 years before GW2 and the fact it wasn’t designed from the ground up as free to play.
Yeah that’s true, LOTRO isn’t really a fair comparison. I had a list of other MMO’s including Champions Online and Star Trek Online, but like you said, Guild Wars 2 was designed from the ground up to be ‘free to play’. Great point!
Sort of like a store with pushy sales staff trying to steer you towards buying the item they’ll benefit most from selling rather than just letting you pick. Like you want a digital camera, so you go to JB HiFi and you talk to the guy there but he’s only interested in selling you the most expensive camera. I wouldn’t call it cheap, maybe distractingly obnoxiously transparent?
Titan is one of Saturn’s moons. Not Jupiter. 😉
Sorry to go off track… But Titan is a moon of Saturn, not Jupiter?
It is way too late in the week and I am way too tired to get preachy about video games.
But if it wasn’t, I would wax lyrical about how all the development time on Titan over the last few years has basically been one giant think-tank on how to make the next WoW, adjusted for the altered climate of F2P and potentially skinner-box-tolerant MMO veterans. (Apparently inducing dopamine hits using certain mechanics over 10yrs can build up a tolerance to the hits provided by those mechanics. Who’d have thought?)
I reckon the last few years’ Titan budget has been 99% psychology, economics, and industry analysis, 1% concept art.
I wouldn’t mind buying a one off purchase followed by unlocking additional areas & levels via a DLC model. Similar to Borderlands 2 but their release window for new content is much shorter then Blizzard would be accustomed to.
The GuildWars approach seems to be pretty successful.. maybe they’ll go that route instead.. just a one-off buy-in… and then in-app-trans if you want to but not forced.. along with the occasional LARGE expansion being another buy-in..
From what I have seen Blizzard is trying hard to get BOTH Microtransactions and a subscription model.
They really seem to be seeing how much stuff they can get away with selling extra in a game you already pay 15 dollars a month for.
Most games with cosmetic micro transactions are free to play! At the height of the game with 12 million subs they would have to be making over 150 million a month which is more than the entire budget of TOR and you get these people saying “Well your fee is to pay for the servers each month, they need to make that extra money selling mounts for 25 dollars each”
How the hell can they spend 150 million dollars a month running servers? Other people will argue that the hire GMs and that is where the money goes but they fired a huge amount of their GM and customer service staff last year. These days If you log a ticket you are looking at 2 days to get a response. They also police cheating and abuse much less than they used to.
Some of you will also notice this expansion they made it take much longer to level and gear alts and they have suddenly implemented a way to pay to increase the amount of experience you get. Im sure next they will start selling us elder charms or whatever they are to let us buy more chances at loot.
I will not be touching the next game they make with a 10 foot pole, Several years ago I could never imagine myself saying this but Blizzard has completely and utterly lost my confidence.
Well, my interest in the game has plummeted slightly. I’ve played f2p mmos before, and while they’re not bad games, it’s a payment model that has no interest to me.
After the EQNext reveal this past weekend, chances are that Titan got “overhauled” because they received leaked info from the EQN project despite SOE’s security precautions. If Titan isn’t a complete ripoff of what they’re doing with EQN I’ll be shocked. Blizzard hasn’t had an original idea since The Lost Vikings.