With Activision Blizzard King now in the hands of Microsoft, it’s only a matter of time before the nearly two-decade-old MMORPG gets rid of its monthly fees…

Xbox Game Studios has undergone another major expansion with the completion of the $68.7 billion deal. We recently wrote about the IPs owned by the “green team” and Warcraft is one of them. Its MMORPG, World of Warcraft, has been with us for a long time, and while it doesn’t have the mainstream audience it had, say, fifteen years ago, there are still plenty of people playing it today, and for older fans, Blizzard has created a more old-school version called World of Warcraft Classic.

The future of Azeroth could change if Microsoft brings World of Warcraft to the Xbox Game Pass. If that happens, there’s a good chance they’ll stop charging monthly fees. Game Pass is a subscription service, and it doesn’t seem logical for Microsoft to make money from two subscriptions. Add to that the add-ons that had to be purchased separately, and without them you miss out on content. But if the subscription requirement goes away, the monthly fee could be replaced by other monetization. Battle Passes, more in-game cosmetic items, or even the subscription fee could become something like Xbox Live Gold (now Xbox Game Pass Core = same service plus 25 games, the rest you have to upgrade to the real Game Pass), or even a new level of Game Pass for the MMO that has been running for almost 20 years.

If Microsoft doesn’t change anything, it could be a logical step, because we’re talking about a game that has been running for 19 years without a break, and now the Xbox ecosystem can support it. The most that could change is that Battle.net is thrown in the trash and launched through the Xbox client, or it could even go to Steam, like Diablo IV and the poorly received Overwatch 2.

Source: GameRant