World of Warcraft has required a $15 monthly subscription to play since its launch back in 2004, but in all those years, the price in the US has never gone up. According to ex-Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, it was due to not wanting to “agitate” the game’s playerbase.
In an interview with the Grit podcast, Kotick reflected on his long history as the CEO of Activision and later Activision Blizzard. Along the way he dove into details about developer Blizzard and WoW’s success.
He said the game over its lifetime has seen over 150 million subscribers, making it the “best subscription business of all time.” When one of the interviewers suggested the price of the subscription could have been “priced more highly” given WoW’s huge success, Kotick pushed back against the idea.
“We never raised the price,” Kotick said. “My view was we come up with value-added services, come up with new things to sell, but just leave the price. We could figure out how to come up with other things to sell them. And it’s a prickly audience, you know? You don’t wanna do too much to agitate them. And even a dollar increase would’ve been a problem in my view.”
Kotick went on to talk about how vital Blizzard veteran Chris Metzen was to the company’s success, and said he was, and still is, “the soul of creativity at the company.” Metzen retired from Blizzard in 2016 (according to Kotick, due to burnout related to the Warcraft movie) but returned in 2022 as a creative advisor on WoW. He is now an executive creative director for the Warcraft universe. Prior to returning to Blizzard, Kotick said Metzen believed WoW’s upcoming expansions were in bad shape, and Kotick “begged him” to return in order to fix them.
“Just come do it, you’re the guy, come do it,” Kotick said he told Metzen.
Kotick said Metzen had his “fingerprints” all over the MMORPG’s latest expansion, The War Within, and that the next expansion, under Metzen’s guidance, “is going to be great.” Once Metzen returned to Blizzard, Kotick said he hardly ever talked with him, instead preferring to let him get to work.
“What am I going to tell Chris Metzen about game design?” Kotick said. “I just wanted him to do his thing.”
Kotick served as CEO of Activision, and later Activision Blizzard, from 1991-2023, stepping down after the publisher’s sale to Microsoft for $69 billion, which came after a variety of controversies involving the publisher.