World of Warcraft
More info
- Creator
- Blizzard Entertainment
- Released
- 2004
- Type
- MMO
- Peak
- about 12 million subscribers (2010)
The MMO that took the genre mainstream, with twelve million paying players at its peak.
Blizzard released the game in 2004 and got two things right: they lowered the barrier so the first tens of hours could be played alone, and they built the endgame around coordinated raids for forty people. The combination captured both the casual player and the one who wanted to spend twenty hours a week on scheduled group exercises.
The game has also become research material. The 2005 Corrupted Blood bug, in which a disease accidentally spread beyond its intended area and paralysed cities, has been studied by epidemiologists as a model of human behaviour during a pandemic. The game still runs, and parallel Classic servers recreate the original version for those who think it was better back then.