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 III: Reign of Chaos
In the middle of January 2002, Blizzard shipped out 5000 beta versions of "Warcraft III" to randomly selected testers in order to help improve it before being released in stores. The beta release had all the game’s units and races, however, it was only playable over Battle.net; single player games and LAN play were not playable on the beta version of the game. "Warcraft III" was first released in the United States on July 3, 2002 and in Europe on July 5, 2002.