There’s a lot of business that goes into making video games. You can have the best game in the world, but if you don’t promote it, plug it, showcase it on social media and the like, and show players that they should play it, you won’t do anything with it. But, another thing that some developers have to determine is what kind of “play model” they want to do. Do they want a single purchase, pay-to-play, free-to-play, subscription, etc.? Well, one analyst thinks that a big AAA title will be going free-to-play soon, and it’s Overwatch.
This comes from Michael Patcher, who told GamesIndustryInternational that he thinks the success of the Overwatch League will lead to the title going free-to-play:
“I think that the 18 Overwatch League owners have been assured by Blizzard that it will expand the audience for Overwatch. The most expedient way to do this is to make the core game free-to-play in order to attract tens of millions of new users, who ostensibly will convert to OWL viewers. I expect this by mid-June (the third anniversary of the launch of the original game. Disgruntled players who bought the core game will likely be compensated by being given free stuff (skins or other cosmetic items).”
It is an interesting idea, and one backed up by the fact that Fortnite went from mainly a purchase model to free-to-play via its Battle Royale mode. And that game made $3 billion dollars in 2018.
Granted, this is far from confirmed, but Blizzard is in a bit of a weird place right now, and so they could be thinking long-term by doing this rather quickly. And though they already have over 35 million accounts for the game all over the world, they could always use more.
Do you think this will happen? Let me know in the comments below.
Sounds pretty possible to me, though I hope that f2p accounts will not have access to the complete hero roster and instead to a selected few only so that people who paid (like me) did pay for good.