With free-to-play games like Free Realms slowly catching up to the subscription based behemoth that is World of Warcraft, I think it’s a fair question whether or not Blizzard has taken notice. In a Videogamer interview with Tom Chilton, the lead designer of WoW, he says that “it’s possible that we could do some kind of micro-transaction stuff. Whether or not World of Warcraft ever goes the direction of, I guess like Anarchy Online has gone the direction of going free-to-play with micro-transactions.”

So, could this mean a free-to-play model for WoW sometime down the line? Don’t get your hopes up too high. He follows the previous statement with, “whether we ever shift to a free-to-play model is really too hard to say at this point. Anything I say now could easily five years from now end up seeming like, oh my gosh, that was an incredibly dumb thing to say, how naive!”

Well, when your game is making more money than Scrooge McDuck, you don’t need to do anything drastic. Of course, he never said never, either.