Blizzard Entertainment
On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released "World of Warcraft", a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. "World of Warcraft" is the fourth released game set in the fantasy "Warcraft" universe, which was first introduced by "" in 1994. Blizzard announced "World of Warcraft" on September 2, 2001. The game was released on November 23, 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the "Warcraft" franchise.
History of massively multiplayer online games
The most recent generation of MMORPGs, based on arbitrary standards of graphics, gameplay, and popularity, is said to have launched in November 2004 with Sony Online Entertainment's "EverQuest II" and Blizzard Entertainment's "World of Warcraft" ("WoW"). At the time, Sony expected to dominate the market, based on the success of the first "EverQuest", and decided to offer a flat monthly rate to play all of their MMORPGs including "EverQuest", "EverQuest II", and "Star Wars Galaxies", to keep from competing with itself. While "EverQuest II" was a commercial success as predicted, "World of Warcraft" immediately overtook all of these games upon release, and indeed became so popular that it dwarfed all previous monthly-fee MMORPGs. At present, "WoW" is one of the most played games in North America, and the most subscribed to MMORPG worldwide, with a total of over 7 million subscriptions in the middle of 2013. The closest MMORPG to "World of Warcraft" is, in terms of paying subscribers, "RuneScape" with more than one million subscribers and even more free players. "RuneScape" is also the world's largest free MMORPG, though it receives less media attention than "WoW". With the release of these newer games, subscriptions began to decline for many older MMORPGs, even the year-old "Lineage II", and in particular "Everquest". The current MMORPG market has "World of Warcraft" in a position similar to the position of Dungeons & Dragons in the tabletop RPG market, with both games' market share being greater than 50% of the overall market.