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".
World of Warcraft
Blizzard routinely applies older expansions to all accounts as new expansions are released. On June 28, 2011, "The Burning Crusade" expansion was automatically applied to all previous "Warcraft" accounts at no cost. On September 19, 2012, the same thing was done with the "Wrath of the Lich King" expansion, and on October 15, 2013 the "Cataclysm" expansion was also applied. On October 15, 2014, "Mists of Pandaria" was applied to all accounts following the release of Warlords. On May 17, 2016, "Warlords of Draenor" was applied to all accounts to coincide with the release of the Warcraft movie that gives a 30-day trial of the game.
All "The Burning Crusade", "Wrath of the Lich King", "Cataclysm", "Mists of Pandaria" and "Warlords of Draenor" content is now effectively part of the original game, with all new "World of Warcraft" accounts automatically including these expansions upon creation. As of the pre-patch release of "Battle for Azeroth" in July 2018, all expansions up to "Legion" are included in the base game.