You Can Now Play Almost All of World of Warcraft for Just $15 a Month

Back when World of Warcraft was the biggest thing in the gaming world, your adventures in Azeroth came with a pretty steep price tag: on top of a computer able to run it (which is obviously a lot cheaper today than it was back then), you had to buy the base game, all the individual expansions, on top of a $15 per month subscription fee. Even if you only wanted to try out this sexy new game for a short while, it could set you back quite a bit.

That’s changed as time has worn down and the game has become less popular. Before long, all you had to do was buy the base game, the latest expansion, and pay the subscription fee in order to get all the content. They also released a crappy “free version” that capped you at level 15 and limited your social interactions, and was followed by a torrent of really obnoxious misleading ads that I swear I haven’t forgotten to this day.

But now they’re making it even cheaper to start an adventure in World of Warcraft. Forget every other price, now you’ll only have to pay 15 dollars a month and you can play the game as much as you like… except you’ll still have to pay the full 60 bucks if you want to try out the latest expansion, Battle for Azeroth.

I mean that’s still, what, six expansions, plus the base game, effectively free. That’s not a bad deal at all. It is clearly designed to lure in more new players (a strategy Blizzard has been chasing ever since the Mists of Pandaria expansion) rather than draw back or keep old ones, and it might just work. Even I find myself a little more tempted to give it another go, and trust me: I am definitely not going to.

The only way I’m re-downloading that nightmare is if I’m paid to do it, dammit.