I would appreciate this pricing model as an option.
this also is very true - wow is an extremely affordable hobby.
if a measly $15/month bothers you, some of you would be horrified at how much people spend on golf, or lego, or season tickets to theater, etc. etc.
Whatever.
They get so much money from bending the knee to ESG directives.
They get much money from mass bot farm accounts.
They get so much money by running a skeleton crew.
They get so much money selling fairy wing mogs.
They get so much money from monthly subs.
They get so much money selling expansions.
Don’t give me that crap.
Blizzard’s job is to produce the highest profit for shareholders.
Everything else is smokescreen.
“They’re just getting by”
Don’t be naive.
Then they run a charity, recieve the tax deduction, and look like heroes.
Whatever.
This,
Oh and, you never get something for nothing.
Because they need your money.
Running MMOs ain’t cheap!
Lot of servers across the globe, need structures to contain those servers and the rent associated with them, need staff to maintain those servers, need defense protocols for attacks on those servers, and then there’s all the new art, music, voice acting, and all manners of changes that are happening in the background that we aren’t privy to that we get every expansion.
Of course, the game has to profit, but even then I’m sure no small amount of cost goes towards making sure the game runs.
Despite this, you don’t have to buy a new expansion. You get multiple expansions worth of content with the base game, which is…A lot of stuff! Even as a trial account you can access a lot of game, albeit with a hefty amount of restrictions.
I’m just saying, keeping the game up isn’t cheap.
Every expansion brings in a large influx of “seasonal” players who aren’t going to stick around for long. Typically only a month or two, then they move on to the next game. Therefore, the expansion sales are a bit injection of revenue and greatly increase the “value” gained from these shorter-term players.
Also, if people are willing to pay for it, Blizz WILL continue to charge it.
Corporations operate on the idea of making the most money, not “enough money”.
In theory, someone could avoid paying for an expansion by waiting until the next prepatch… meaning the expansion itself is kind of an “early access” feature, depending on how you want to look at it. However, recent data shows that players are more than willing to pay extra for a few days of earlier access rather than wait up to two years to avoid paying for it all together… so not changing anytime soon.
Money.
10/char
Fixed that …
ughh thanks for that reminder.
Because it’s not just the tickets. Each time you go, it’s an … EVENT!!!
Which means: you’re going out to dinner before hand. You’ll often get a couple drinks after with friends/ other people that went to talk about the show.
Just between Les Mis and Hamilton, I probably spent more money than I have on the entire 20+ years of playing WoW. Not even exaggerating.
Other hobbies are so expensive by comparison, I don’t even bother with that analogy. I simply point out that (esp in 2025), I spend more for lunch on any given day than I do for my MONTHLY WoW sub. lol
WoW is cheap.
Yea its dumb why in earth would blizzard as a company want more money …thats just dumb what other company on earth acts like this and charges for products…aww geez so unfair
To pay for the development that goes into the “large patch update”
(because we all know large patch updates come with a new raid, new dungeons, new campaign and possibly new classes/races and features all at once 
, please name one major patch that’s even close to a full expansion release)
So when it comes time for a raise do you tell your boss “Oh don’t bother. I’m not greedy. In fact I’ll even take a pay cut because I think people should get the hard work of others for free”.
Because you’re getting an injection of new content all at once. New LvL cap. 3-4+ new zones, new raid, new PvP season. Armor sets, quests, new story. Coupled with the fact that the people who worked on it need to have their time and skillset compensated.
If we wanted to treat expansions as “Just large patches” then Blizz would chop the content up into pieces and make us wait 3 months in between probably.
If you wait 18 months then it will be free, and without all of the timegates and roadblocks. The only reasons players pay for it is desperation and FoMO.
just get drunk, you’re home already…
Things cost money. News at 11.
I always imagined that if we paid for previous expansions, even today, we should somehow have access to everything that was made in them. They should create ways, quests, or events that allow us to obtain each item or complete every part of that expansion.
Things that remain locked or inaccessible feel strange to me because they had a designer back then to produce the appearance, a team to write the text, place the NPCs, create the quest/event and… after the expansion ends, some items gets “locked.”
For example, I think it’s been 12–13 years since MoP, and there’s a dark red DK set from elite PvP 2.2k back then (something that would be around 1800 today) that got locked, and I’ve never seen anyone using it in-game. I see people wearing the blue and green ones, but not that dark red one.
Why would a set like that stay locked away with no access? They paid a designer, a programmer, a team to create it, color it, place it on the NPC, etc… and now it’s just there, forgotten in time…
For a completionist, this must be a nightmare…
For someone who couldn’t play the expansion due to financial issues, health problems, or life circumstances… it must be sad…
For someone who started in the following expansion, it feels strange…
They should create events or something like the PvP mounts, where you can earn a currency after reaching 100% of the current mount — there should be a percentage system where, as you make progress, you earn a token and can buy an old locked item.
For PvE, it could work like this: by playing dungeons/raids through LFG with classes marked as “call to arms,” we would gradually fill a bar that gives us a token to claim a mount or some old locked content.
For PvP, the same idea.
Then Blizzard would just need to manage what role are more necessary for every modality — usually healers/tanks for PvE and healers for PvP. They’d be solving two problems at once.
Have you not seen the deluxe editions they offer? They cost more than a PS game.
Can’t dispute that.