Warcraft
In 2004, Blizzard Entertainment moved the series away from the real-time strategy genre and released "World of Warcraft", a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Requiring a subscription fee to be paid to play, it also introduced regular additional content to the series in the form of patches. "World of Warcraft" gained popularity worldwide, becoming the world's largest subscription-based MMORPG in 2008. The game reached a peak 12 million subscribers worldwide in October 2010. "World of Warcraft" has had seven expansions as of 2018. During the production of "", Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce stated that "If there's a team that's passionate about doing another "Warcraft" [real-time strategy], then that's definitely something we would consider. It's nothing that we're working on right now, we have development teams working on "", "", "Diablo III", and when those teams are all off the projects they're working on, they'll be intimately involved in the discussions about what's next".
Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans
In August 1998, Roper confirmed that Blizzard planned to complete the animated cutscenes for "Warcraft Adventures", as they could help Blizzard sell film and television studios on the idea of adapting the property. He remarked, "It's one thing to have a bunch of cool stills, and it's another thing to have a fifteen-minute short to show them." While this plan was shelved, the "Warcraft Adventures" story proceeded to inspire much of the later "Warcraft" franchise. When the game was first announced in early 1997, speculation arose that Blizzard planned to follow it with the real-time strategy game "", which the company confirmed a few months later. Intended from the start to build upon the events of "Warcraft Adventures", "Warcraft III" ultimately continued the story of Thrall, and takes place after his reunification of the Horde and defeat of its human captors. Thrall and his father Durotan, also created for "Warcraft Adventures", played major parts in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game "World of Warcraft" and the 2016 film "Warcraft". Wes Fenlon of "PC Gamer US" wrote in 2016, "Few canceled games can claim to have as much impact as "Lord of the Clans", and in the end it seems like Thrall was more valuable than the game itself."