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 (video game)
"StarCraft" was released internationally on March 31, 1998 and became the best-selling PC game for that year, selling over 1.5 million copies worldwide. In the United States, it was best-selling computer game of 1998, with 746,365 units sold. It was the country's 14th best-selling release of the period between 1993 and 1999, selling 916,000 copies. By April 1999, South Korean players had purchased almost 300,000 units of the game. "StarCraft"s worldwide sales reached 4 million units by July 2001; South Korea accounted for 50% of these copies. By May 2007, "StarCraft" had sold over 9.5 million copies across the globe, with 4.5 million of these being sold in South Korea. Since the initial release of "StarCraft", Blizzard Entertainment reported that its Battle.net online multiplayer service grew by 800 percent.