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".
Gameplay of World of Warcraft
In a change from the previous "Warcraft" games produced by Blizzard, "World of Warcraft" is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) where thousands of players can interact with each other. Despite this change, the game draws many similarities with its predecessors. These include using the same setting of the world of Azeroth as well as following a similar art direction. In common with many MMORPGs, "World of Warcraft" requires players to pay for a subscription, usually either by credit card or by buying a card from a retailer to redeem for a predetermined amount of subscription time; in addition, game time may be acquired from using in-game gold to buy a WoW Token.