WOW GOLD Free-to-play games are steadily gaining traction in the market and developers everywhere are seeing the benefits. Rumor has it that Blizzard Entertainment is about to grab themselves a piece of that pie with their own free-to-play game.

It's no secret that free-to-play games are taking the industry by storm. WOW GOLD Take a look at Medawky's Microcosms weekly column for a nice overview of just some of the titles that were promoted at GDC. Until recently it was difficult to tell just how successful the cash shop model has been. Fenando Paiz of Turbine revealed some impressive numbers which illustrates how powerful the market really is.

Everyone is jumping on board of late. SOE and Turbine may have been the front runners of the Western market in terms of companies who have gone from subscription based games to free-to-play options, but it isn't ending there. WOW GOLD Blizzard Entertainment joined up fairly recently too with their pet store. The trend is huge, and it's here to stay. During his keynote at GDC V-Con, John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment recently thanked Blizzard for coming on board, which ended up taking some of the heat off the guys who took the first step for the Westerners. Early stages of microtransaction options had been viewed in somewhat of a negative light by gamers and the adoption of the model by the "big guys" has helped in the transition of what promises to become the industry standard in the not-so-distant future.

Don't believe it? Some of the most populated sessions at GDC were focused solely on the marketing of microtransaction stores, social games, WOW GOLD and market penetration of the cash shops. Professionals everywhere were crowding into the rooms to either speak, listen or learn from the companies who have already made the change over.

But will these companies ever make the full leap into free-to-play games? SOE and Turbine already have, and Ten Ton Hammer was able to catch wind that Blizzard Entertainment may be soon to follow. WOW GOLDWe were told that Blizzard has started a 3-year project featuring a free-to-play browser-based game supported by microtransactions. The theme and genre is otherwise unknown. When we approached Blizzard for official confirmation we received a simple "no comment." While that may not be exactly the proof in the pudding, so to speak, rarely is a "no comment" comment commented when there's nothing to comment about.

It's no surprise, really. If there's one thing Blizzard knows well, it's how to make money. With the massive success of recent games like DDO, Free Realms and several others, it would be rather foolish to ignore the opportunity.

Now, I may have come off here in a business-minded tone, but from a gamer's perspective it's not a bad thing either. Few of us actually want to pay multiple subscriptions for multiple games so having free options allows us to take control of how much we want to play of each game. With free-to-play games it's a completely customized package where we can play what we want, when we want, without paying barrels of cash for a bounty of subscriptions.  WOW GOLD The days of "there's only one MMOG for me" are quickly falling behind us as the market becomes saturated with new and exciting titles. The only realistic option here is for the games to become subscription-free with revenue coming in from alternate sources to keep the servers up and the developers employed.

Not that Blizzard will have any problems with making money from the project anyway. They've always had an uncanny ability to virtually print cash and now that the hard part of opening players to the concept has been done by other developers it should be a relatively easy run for them.WOW GOLD  It will also benefit the existing free-to-play companies by doing exactly what they did with the launch of WoW - that is, to introduce a whole boatload of new gamers to a new concept.

It could end up as a double edged sword for Blizzard though. Will introducing their fans to free-to-play games inevitably send players to try out other free-to-play titles? With WoW, risk was minimal due to the simple fact that only rarely would gamers pay for multiple subscriptions. Remove that block though, and who knows where the gamers will end up? It will be an exciting and interesting road ahead of us all.