World of Warcraft
"World of Warcraft" was first announced by Blizzard at the ECTS trade show in September 2001. Released in 2004, development of the game took roughly 4–5 years, including extensive testing. The 3D graphics in "World of Warcraft" use elements of the proprietary graphics engine originally used in "Warcraft III". The game was designed to be an open environment where players are allowed to do what they please. Quests are optional and were designed to help guide players, allow character development, and to spread characters across different zones to try to avoid what developers called "player collision". The game interface allows players to customize appearance and controls, and to install add-ons and other modifications.
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.