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".
StarCraft II World Championship Series
The StarCraft II World Championship Series was founded alongside a move to share branding among Blizzard Entertainment's competitive games and tournaments under the name Battle.net World Championship Series, which also included "World of Warcraft" competition. The first year of competition, the 2012 StarCraft II World Championship Series, featured over 30 events including national and continental championships that fed into the grand finals of the year held in Shanghai, China alongside the "World of Warcraft" finals. Events were limited to a few days or weeks of play with nationality-based limitations. This format lead to the series of events being well-viewed but not considered the peak of "StarCraft II" competition, especially all events that featured no Koreans and strict nationality requirements for players of the respective nationality or continent.