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".
Firefall (video game)
Red 5 Studios was an American computer game company that was known for its high ratio of former employees of Blizzard Entertainment. The founders previously worked on "World of Warcraft". Mark Kern was a team lead, William Petras was art director, and Taewon Yun was part of the company's Korean operation which oversaw the launch of "World of Warcraft" in Asia. The company's only game release was "Firefall".