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
A Russian fan under the pseudonym "MAN-Biker" leaked gameplay footage of "Warcraft Adventures" via a YouTube video in 2010. According to "PC Gamer US", he had received his copy from a Russian game developer in the late 2000s, although this developer had not personally worked on "Warcraft Adventures". After the video's deletion, MAN-Biker posted a beginning-to-end longplay of the game in 2014. However, this version of the game lacked cutscenes. A complete, playable "Warcraft Adventures", including its cutscenes, was leaked online by a Russian Blizzard fan with the screen name "reidor" on September 9, 2016. Reidor told "PC Gamer US" that he had been sent the files by an unnamed third party. Soon after, the version shown in MAN-Biker's videos was leaked as well. Chris Higgins of PCGamesN speculated that these copies of the game derived from employees at Animation Magic's Russian office. Blizzard responded with takedown notices to reidor and peer-to-peer file sharing websites that hosted the game, but Wes Fenlon remarked, "By then, of course, it was too late."