World of Warcraft Turns 10: How the Most Popular Game in History Changed the World | QDaily Business History

We've gone through everything a single game has changed over the past 10 years. Sadly, Blizzard, the company that made it, never carried that glory over to mobile. Will the world ever see another game as influential as World of Warcraft?

Regular article

Remember Jia Junpeng, back in 2009? An empty post on Baidu's WoW forum — "Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner" — went viral and became one of that year's biggest events in China. WoW is short for World of Warcraft, and that forum was one of the largest gathering places for Chinese players of the game. Some think the post took off because players were stuck waiting for an update that would not come, and were killing time out of boredom. That alone says how popular World of Warcraft was in China then.

The story goes back to 2001, when Blizzard decided to build a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) using the Warcraft series it had spent years developing as its story, and called it World of Warcraft.

The first three Warcraft games were real-time strategy titles, the genre Blizzard was best at, and Warcraft 3 in particular was considered the high point of the genre. But Blizzard had never built an online game, and watching it step into unfamiliar territory made everyone nervous on its behalf.

The World of Warcraft logo

On November 23, 2004, only three years later, Blizzard finished World of Warcraft. The game was a hit at once, and the number of players online soon passed ten million. People all over the world were playing it — not just to unwind, but to make friends and fall in love. Players lived a second life inside it.

No game has ever had an influence this lasting or this wide. This November, World of Warcraft turns ten. Let's take stock of how the most successful online game ever made has changed our world.

A map of World of Warcraft

1. It is the most-played, longest-running online game ever made.

As of December 2013, 100 million accounts had been registered. If World of Warcraft's players formed a country, its population would slide easily into the world's top 15. Harder still to imagine: the game reaches 224 countries and regions, which means someone is playing it almost anywhere on Earth — quite possibly a "priest" inside Vatican City, or a researcher at an Antarctic station.

Social life inside the game is just as tangled. More than 9 million guilds have been formed, and the auction house alone handles 1.02 billion transactions a year. It is hard to believe a game world this lively has already been running for nine years. Even though mobile games have pulled away a fair number of players in recent years, World of Warcraft still holds 36% of the global MMORPG market.

2. It created and refined a set of game rules that have become the model for the whole MMORPG genre.

Before World of Warcraft, Ultima Online and EverQuest were already very successful online games. But they were unfriendly to use: outside a small core of hardcore players, most ordinary players struggled to find a way in. World of Warcraft changed all of that.

For instance, before Blizzard put that big question mark over an NPC's head, players in other games had no idea where to go to find something to do — back then, finding a quest was itself a quest. Blizzard also required PvP combat to be consensual on both sides, so no one could attack unilaterally, which kept newcomers from being pushed around by veterans. And the instance dungeon, now the single most important concept in online gaming, was first proposed by Blizzard in 2001. In other words, after World of Warcraft, every other MMORPG started to look much the same.

A Gamasutra editor's collection

3. A series of novels, comics and films — both to mine the property's untapped value and to fill out the world's lore.

Warcraft may be Blizzard's most successful cross-media franchise. Beyond the steady stream of World of Warcraft expansions, Blizzard has published more than 20 World of Warcraft novels, six comic volumes and six animations. A film of the same name, made with Legendary Pictures, is set for release in 2016. On the gaming side, the recent card game Hearthstone and the multiplayer online battle arena game Heroes of the Storm both borrow World of Warcraft's setting.

4. World of Warcraft stopped being a game long ago; it became a culture.

On the overseas forum Reddit, one player wrote: "I'm 20 today, which means I've played WoW my entire childhood." The post struck a nerve, and replies poured in: "I was still in high school when I started; now I'm about to finish my PhD." "My son is 8, which means I've been playing since he was 6 months old, and now he's playing too." World of Warcraft has become something these people cannot separate from their lives; their identity carries one line more than everyone else's — Alliance or Horde.

The Alliance and Horde emblems

Old cities hold plenty of stories. In Shattrath City, players can find a night elf huntress named Caylee Dak with her pet leopard. The character once belonged to a player named Dak Krause, who had leukemia and died on August 22, 2007. Because she was well liked in her guild, guild members held a funeral for her inside World of Warcraft of their own accord. When Blizzard heard about it, the company kept her character on the server, and she became known as "the hunter who never logs off." There are many stories like this. World of Warcraft has its own legends, tales and history, and it is this player-made material that forms the game's most valuable culture.

5. Warcraft: made by the same hand that may unmake it?

It has to be said that World of Warcraft reached a peak other game companies would not dare aim for, and that even Blizzard has struggled to repeat.

After World of Warcraft launched, Blizzard grew from fewer than 500 people to 5,000. The company poured people and money into keeping the game running, and the game repaid it, becoming Blizzard's most important source of profit for years. Blizzard's hold on the massively multiplayer online (MMO) market has been dominant throughout. In 2009, World of Warcraft held 58% of that market. As noted above, it still held 36% in 2013, and with the coming expansion Warlords of Draenor, that share is expected to pass 40% again.

The earnings reports show that even though the number of paying World of Warcraft subscribers kept falling — from a peak of 12 million in 2010 to just over 7 million in 2013 — the game still earns strongly. In the five years between its 2005 launch and 2009, World of Warcraft brought Blizzard $2.2 billion in profit, an average of $44 million a year.

Blizzard's 2014 earnings report shows that in the first nine months of 2013 alone, World of Warcraft brought in $71.4 million in net profit, 85% of Blizzard's total. In 2014 the figure slipped a little, to $60.1 million, and its share of total profit fell much further — mainly because no new expansion arrived in 2014 to lift the game, and because Blizzard was pushing other lines of work. But with Warlords of Draenor out, World of Warcraft's numbers should look better next year.

At the same time, though, Blizzard has been tied down by World of Warcraft. A company that made its name on single-player games seems, ever since launching it, to have turned into a pure online-game company.

Apart from StarCraft II in 2010, Blizzard's recent games — from Diablo III (2012) to Hearthstone (2014), plus the coming Heroes of the Storm and the newly announced Overwatch — are online games across the board. What should worry the company most is that, other than Diablo III, which reached consoles, and Hearthstone, which has a mobile client, all of them are PC-only for now.

Left: the global PC market from 2007 to 2015. Right: World of Warcraft paying subscribers from 2005 to 2014.

The two sets of data are clearly positively correlated: they rise and fall in step, and both peaked in 2010. World of Warcraft's huge success, then, cannot be separated from the growth of the PC market, and as that market has sagged in recent years, its player numbers have fallen with it. With the global PC market showing no sign of picking up, it is hard to call it a wise choice for Blizzard to keep putting most of its energy into PC online games while leaving console and mobile development aside.

Finally, here is the official 10th-anniversary World of Warcraft documentary, World of Warcraft: Looking for Group.