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
Many of the characters, locations and concepts introduced in "Warcraft III" and its expansion went on to play major roles in Blizzard's "World of Warcraft", released in 2004. They also appeared in other Blizzard games, such as "Hearthstone". In October 2018, "Comic Book Resources" listed four characters introduced in "Warcraft III" in their list of the Top 25 most iconic characters ever created by Blizzard, including Illidan Stormrage at #1 and Jaina Proudmoore at #3.