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".
History of massively multiplayer online games
The most recent generation of MMORPGs, based on arbitrary standards of graphics, gameplay, and popularity, is said to have launched in November 2004 with Sony Online Entertainment's "EverQuest II" and Blizzard Entertainment's "World of Warcraft" ("WoW"). At the time, Sony expected to dominate the market, based on the success of the first "EverQuest", and decided to offer a flat monthly rate to play all of their MMORPGs including "EverQuest", "EverQuest II", and "Star Wars Galaxies", to keep from competing with itself. While "EverQuest II" was a commercial success as predicted, "World of Warcraft" immediately overtook all of these games upon release, and indeed became so popular that it dwarfed all previous monthly-fee MMORPGs. At present, "WoW" is one of the most played games in North America, and the most subscribed to MMORPG worldwide, with a total of over 7 million subscriptions in the middle of 2013. The closest MMORPG to "World of Warcraft" is, in terms of paying subscribers, "RuneScape" with more than one million subscribers and even more free players. "RuneScape" is also the world's largest free MMORPG, though it receives less media attention than "WoW". With the release of these newer games, subscriptions began to decline for many older MMORPGs, even the year-old "Lineage II", and in particular "Everquest". The current MMORPG market has "World of Warcraft" in a position similar to the position of Dungeons & Dragons in the tabletop RPG market, with both games' market share being greater than 50% of the overall market.