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
Blizzard struggled to adapt to the adventure genre during development, and the slowness of the international production pipeline became a major problem for the team. Unhappy with the game's progress, Blizzard delayed "Warcraft Adventures" past its original release date of late 1997 and hired game designer Steve Meretzky to revise the project in February 1998. This resulted in a plan to edit and improve the game with minimal changes to its art: "Warcraft Adventures" was already near completion, and deadline and budget restrictions prevented a major redesign. Meretzky's plan went largely unused, as an internal review at Blizzard determined that its implementation would lead to excessive delays. Instead, the developer chose to cancel the project in May 1998, after roughly 18 months of work.