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".
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard, announced during the opening ceremony of Blizzcon 2009 that "StarCraft II" and the new Battle.net platform would both be released in 2010, with an approximately one-month gap between releases. As of March 2010, Blizzard had stated that the new platform was being tested outside the beta and was planned for release in early July 2010, for both "StarCraft II" and "", with a later upgrade for "Diablo III". On May 5, 2010, it was revealed that "StarCraft II" and Battle.net 2.0 would be integrated with social networking site Facebook, "linking the world's premier online gaming platform with the world's most popular social platform"—a move that allowed gamers to search among their Facebook friends for "StarCraft II" opponents. "Wired" magazine, in its annual Vaporware Award, ranked "StarCraft II" first among the delayed technology products of 2009. "StarCraft II" was finally released on July 27, 2010, with launch parties in selected cities of countries around the world. Customers and reviewers who received the installation DVD before the July 27 release were greeted with an error screen, telling them to wait until the release date. There was no known workaround and some reviewers had praised the action for limiting journalists to playing and reviewing the game with actual players.