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 III in esports
The expansion to the computer game "", known as "", had an active professional competition scene, particularly in China, Germany, and South Korea. The game was featured at eSports festivals including the World Cyber Games, the Electronic Sports World Cup, the World e-Sports Games, the World Series of Video Games and the International E-Sports Festival. Outside of the professional circuit, the game had many active competitive circuits, with users at Battle.net ranging between the 70,000 and 100,000 at any given moment. In China, in which "Warcraft III" was extremely popular due to it being easily available through piracy, fans and users often used an alternative client due to the country's poor internet connections to the outside world. Around 3,000,000 copies of the game were sold in the country. 500,000 Chinese competed in the Chinese qualifiers for the 2006 World Cyber Games. The amount of prize money through the years has been significant with top players winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. As usual in competitive gaming, income for "Warcraft 3" professional players flowed from various sources like team salaries from pro-gaming teams and sponsorships usually computer technology related. A famous example was Danish gaming organization known as Meet Your Makers which boasted of paying their players 300,000 on an annual basis. Similar to older games with huge competitive scenes like Starcraft:Brood War and "Counter-Strike 1.6", the popularity of "Warcraft 3" steadily declined and towards the end of the previous decade almost all tournaments and players were Chinese. After 2010, with "Starcraft 2", "League of Legends", and "Dota 2" being released and becoming popular, "Warcraft 3" gave up its position as one of the prime eSports titles.There have been various Warcraft III world championships, see Warcraft III World Championships for an overview.