World of Warcraft just took a big step towards going free-to-play

Going free-to-play is, rather unfairly, considered a sign that an MMO is dying. World of Warcraft is pretty much the only MMO that has managed to maintain its monthly subscription fee for the entirety of its existence without any permanent price drops. While that hasn’t changed, the MMO has adopted a new system that takes it about as close to going free-to-play as it has ever gone. This system essentially allows users to purchase subscriptions using in-game currency.

A few days before Thanksgiving in 2004, Blizzard unleashed World of Warcraft upon the unsuspecting gaming populace, changing the online gaming landscape forever. Azeroth wasn’t the first online world, but it was the first to prove those worlds could work on a massive scale and could reach an otherwise non-gaming audience. WoW has dominated the MMO market since its inception — and still rules the subscription-based roost to this day — but the payment model of all those games stretching the limit of your smartphone’s storage suggest that even though WoW was an original innovator, it’s now lagging behind the times. World of Warcraft hasn’t yet gone free-to-play because it hasn’t needed to, but Blizzard has officially begun testing the waters by introducing in-game real money trading.