By World of Warcraft has required a $15 monthly subscription to play since its launch in 2004, but throughout these years, the price in the US has never increased. According to former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, this was due to the desire to avoid “disturbing” the game’s player community.
In a discussion with the Grit podcast, Kotick reminisced about his extensive tenure as the CEO of Activision and later Activision Blizzard. During this time, he delved into insights about developer Blizzard and the achievements of WoW.
He noted that over its lifetime, the game has attracted more than 150 million subscribers, making it the “most successful subscription service of all time.” When one of the prominent interviewers suggested that the subscription price could have been “set higher” given WoW’s monumental success, Kotick dismissed the idea.
“We never raised the price,” Kotick stated. “My perspective was to provide value-added services, introduce new offerings to sell, but maintain the existing price. We could find ways to generate additional products for them. And it’s a sensitive audience, you know? You don’t want to do anything that might upset them. Even a dollar increase could have been problematic in my opinion.”
Kotick continued to emphasize how significant Blizzard’s Chris Metzen was to the company’s success, mentioning that he was and still remains “the heart of creativity at the firm.” Metzen retired from Blizzard in 2016 (according to Kotick, due to burnout associated with the Warcraft movie) but returned in 2022 as a creative advisor on WoW. He is now a chief creative director for the Warcraft universe. Before his return to Blizzard, Kotick mentioned that Metzen believed WoW’s future expansions were in poor condition, and Kotick “pleaded with him” to come back to fix them.
“Just come do it, you’re the person, come do it,” Kotick recalled telling Metzen.
Kotick stated that Metzen had his “fingerprints” all over the MMORPG’s latest expansion, The War Within, and that the upcoming expansion, under Metzen’s guidance, “is going to be fantastic.” Once Metzen came back to Blizzard, Kotick mentioned that he rarely communicated with him, preferring instead to let him get to work.
“What could I possibly tell Chris Metzen?”