WOW's lead designer, Tom Chilton has gone on record saying that at somepoint charging a subscription for their world-beating will stop making sense.

Chilton told PC Gamer that could forsee a time when the subscription would no longer be a viable option for them however that is not something that they will be thinking about in the near future.

He said: "I feel like theyre doing that to compete with other games that are on a similar subscriber level to what they were at. I imagine that when one of them went free to play it cannibalized some of the other subscribers. I can definitely imagine that being the case with World of Warcraft. If another game comes along and blows us away it may not make sense for us to have a subscription fee. Or even further down the line, when we have another MMO out."

Just to be perfectly clear about where Blizzard were headed with WOW just now Chilton added: Were not spending a lot of time thinking about it. Its not something thats a reality for us in the near future.

By Ewan Aiton