It's Warcraft's World

World of Warcraft shouldn't exist. Not anymore.

When it launched more than 10 years ago in 2004, the online game couldn't have been further from the mainstream. Though other role-playing fantasies set in immersive online worlds populated by real people certainly existed, they were niche pastimes, technical achievements enjoyed by players who numbered in the tens of thousands.

World of Warcraft would be different, a freak of nature that at its eventual peak drew 12 million players into the vast online world of Azeroth—and one that, 10 years later, still regularly welcomes more than 10 million people to its digital shores. Over the course of its life span, World of Warcraft has woven its way into the fabric of pop culture in a manner few videogames have outside of Super Mario Bros. It has been referenced on sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother, spoofed by South Park, and employed to pay tribute to the late Robin Williams. The game has introduced people who became lifelong friends, married couples, and proud parents (see sidebar). A culture sprang up around it, complete with memes and in-jokes all its own.

All this, despite a rapidly evolving media landscape that has seen entertainment consumption behaviors change dramatically. Online video was in its nascency when WoW launched. The practice of what would come to be called “bingeing” applied only to owners of DVD box sets. We weren’t all walking around with portable gaming devices—full-blown entertainment centers, even—in our pockets.

While the heady days of WoW’s late-aughts peak are growing distant in the rearview, the game remains monolithic in the entertainment landscape, the platonic ideal of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) genre it helped make popular. People have been trying to re-create it from the moment it was released. They've all fallen short.

A gaming experience created with 2004 technology and initially tailored to the expectations of a 2004 audience shouldn’t still exist. And yet, World of Warcraft is still here.

Why is that?

Jesse Cox likes to tell a story that underscores the irony of what he does for a living, which is play video games:

Fifteen years ago Cox, now 33, was partying at the Dayton, Ohio, home of his friend Mike. At some point midway through the evening, people noticed that Mike had disappeared. From his own party.

“Everyone was like, ‘he’s probably with a girl, oh yeah, Mike!’” Cox says. “I was like, ‘no, he’s not.’”

Jesse found Mike alone in his room, playing an online fantasy role-playing game called Everquest. "It was one of those moments that made me think, ‘I'm never going to be playing games like this guy,’” Cox recalls. This was an easy thing for Cox to claim—at the time, he wasn't into games, having only ever played Super Nintendo at friends’ houses.

He was wrong. These days Cox is a successful YouTube creator based in Los Angeles. He makes videos of himself playing games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, and is a member of Maker Studios' Polaris network, a collection of YouTube channels starring some of the site’s biggest gaming personalities. The YouTube superstar PewDiePie is one of Cox's labelmates. Cox himself has more than 775,000 subscribers.

It’s a far cry from the onetime nongamer’s former occupation as a high school history teacher, and it was World of Warcraft that sparked the switch. Cox had begun dipping into games in his spare time and found himself drawn to WoW by its elaborate backstory and the wealth of lore detailing Azeroth's history. That it was easy to pick up and play expedited his conversion from videogame tourist to enthusiast.

“WoW made a casual videogame player like myself feel at home," says Cox. "I was immediately hooked." After Cox lost his job during a round of layoffs in the middle of the 2009–10 school year—hardly peak hiring season for teachers—he found himself with a lot of time to play. To keep himself busy he started making videos, and since he had beta access to WoW's Cataclysm expansion, he was covering something people wanted to see.

“A few months later, it was literally my job to make online videos,” says Cox, who has posted more than 2,700 of them. "I still don't even know how it happened exactly. It just sort of did."

In many ways, Blizzard Entertainment is the Pixar of videogame studios. Founded in 1991 in Irvine, Calif., Blizzard—which changed its name twice in its first three years, from Silicon & Synapse to Chaos Studios and then to its current moniker—has an unrivaled portfolio of beloved franchises, to the point where new releases or announcements become highly anticipated events. It's a reputation the company earned with a 16-year streak of hits that has made it the envy of mainstream developers.

Starting in 1998 with its wildly popular strategy game Starcraft, every title released by Blizzard has debuted at No. 1 and gone on to be one of that year’s most critically and commercially successful games, from 2002’s Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos to 2012's Diablo III. The studio’s fans are passionate and loyal, and its games have serious staying power—players of Blizzard games tend to stick around until the next Blizzard game comes along to replace it.

While every Blizzard release is the product of hundreds of talented people, the story of how World of Warcraft came to be is closely tied to that of Chris Metzen. Today he's Blizzard's senior vice president of story and franchise development, but in 1993 he wasn't even sure what Blizzard did when he applied to work for them. Metzen was 19 years old and assumed Blizzard, then called Chaos, was a simple design shop when he showed up with a portfolio full of things that had filled his imagination growing up.

At roughly the same time Metzen began his work at Blizzard, the studio was hard at work on a real-time strategy game called Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. It was a different sort of experience than what World of Warcraft users know—as a strategy game, players didn't so much control characters as give them orders. It was the studio's first game set in the world of Azeroth, full of magic and orcs and warriors locked in combat, and it was warmly received by both gamers and critics. Metzen remembers being thrilled by the studio's work on the game, how it sang of Dungeons & Dragons and other stories he loved.

"I was aware of the lore behind the game and the kingdom, Azeroth, that had been built to house the story," says Metzen. "I thought it would be fun to take that and really run with it." Staying late one night, he dreamed up a page of fiction that picked up where the first Warcraft game ended. That outline made its way to Allen Adham, Blizzard's then president and one of the studio's cofounders. He liked it.

"He saw something in me and said, 'Screw it, you're one of the designers on Warcraft II. If you want to develop the story, go ahead,’" says Metzen. Under senior designer Ron Millar, Metzen crafted the story for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. He channeled his affinity for grand, sweeping ideas—born from his love of comic books and the mythology of fantasy franchises like D&D—to establish Azeroth as a place brimming with history from which dramatic conflict would erupt.

Warcraft II was released in December 1995 to critical acclaim. Whereas the first Warcraft was a bold but imperfect entry in the burgeoning real-time strategy genre, Warcraft II was able to build on that foundation in important, lasting ways—for example, it introduced the Fog of War mechanic, now a strategy-game staple that involves shrouding portions of the map in darkness if a player doesn’t have eyes on the ground. The game was rightly praised for its technical achievements—though the advances it made with its storytelling, however less heralded, were just as significant to the evolution and reputation of the Warcraft franchise.

"I always argued that if we built a fun game, with tactile controls and tight design, people are gonna want to continue to play," says Metzen. "But if we also provided a depth of world and a purpose behind the actions players were taking, then that would draw people in emotionally. The fusion of those things would be a powerful franchise."

Yet despite Warcraft II’s overwhelming success, the powerful franchise Metzen envisioned would have to wait. Blizzard spent the next five years launching two of PC gaming’s biggest series: Diablo in 1996 and Starcraft in 1998. Diablo II followed in 2000, joining Starcraft as one of the biggest-selling PC games of all time—even 10 years later, physical copies of Diablo were still among the top-selling PC games.

When Blizzard announced they were returning to Warcraft in 1999, the studio was in a much different place, often mentioned in the same breath as revered studios like Valve and id, the makers of classics like Half-Life and Doom, respectively. Starcraft, which brought an unprecedented scale and scope to the real-time strategy genre, became a favorite of the budding competitive e-sports scene and a bona fide global phenomenon, with university courses and celebrities alike espousing its merits. So when Blizzard decided that their next strategy project would be the long-awaited return to Warcraft (Diablo was an action RPG), Metzen and the team knew they had to go even bigger than ever before. But in the years that had elapsed, their idea of “bigger” had changed.

"By the time we were beginning Warcraft III, we had a different level of experience,” he recalls. “Perhaps, heaven forbid, some maturation had occurred in my mid-20s. I was ready to sink my teeth into something a little deeper, a little more textured. I wanted to create memorable characters that were going through some rough times."

And that’s just what Blizzard did. Released on July 3, 2002, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was another massive success, a bigger and better game from a studio that could do no wrong. As IGN reported on July 22, 2002, “Warcraft III shattered sales records, with more than one million units sold worldwide and 4.4 million units shipped…. [Warcraft III] is now the fastest-selling PC game ever.”

But as it would turn out, the most noteworthy product to come out of Warcraft III's development wasn't Warcraft III.

Here’s a crazy story:

Toward the end of WoW's first year, in September 2005, something went wrong. The game was about three months shy of its first anniversary and already had between four and six million subscribers. It was easily the biggest online world ever created. Then, without warning, it began to work in a way that was frighteningly real: Azeroth became afflicted with a plague.

Earlier that month, on Sept. 13, Blizzard introduced a new raid—a massive dungeon challenge meant to be tackled by groups of players working together to plumb its depths and defeat a powerful monster lying in wait. This raid was called Zul'Gurub, and its boss was Hakkar the Soulflayer.

Hakkar had a nasty trick in his arsenal: He could infect players with a disease called Corrupted Blood that instantly killed weaker players and severely hurt higher-level ones. It was also contagious. This was by design. What Blizzard didn't plan for was Corrupted Blood ever making it out of Zul'Gurub.

When it did, it spread rapidly through the world. Players panicked, abandoning cities to avoid infection. Blizzard scrambled to respond, initially with virtual quarantines. Those didn't work—many players disregarded them, while more malicious users, eager to sow chaos, willfully spread the disease.

Blizzard's hand was eventually forced: There was no way to get rid of the plague other than resetting the game's servers and refreshing the game world. While that wasn’t quite the nuclear option—server restarts, which take the game offline for 15 to 30 minutes, are a normal part of maintenance—it was still a bad look for Blizzard. When operating a persistent world like WoW, studios want to preserve its integrity to the best of their ability. That means, among other things, limiting the sort of "divine intervention" that would be parodied by South Park in the season 10 episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft." In a game that's all about adventures and lore, having an all-powerful developer/deity fix a problem is a lame ending to a wild story.

(Of course, sometimes it’s unavoidable. In another incident, a massive monster called Lord Kazzak was lured away from his lair and into a nearby town, where he began slaughtering everyone who crossed his path. Outside of his lair Kazzak was essentially unbeatable, so a Blizzard employee had to delete him from the town and then make it so he couldn't leave his dungeon.)

The Corrupted Blood incident was a seminal moment in World of Warcraft history. Mainstream media picked up the story, and epidemiologists have used it as a case study in how plagues are spread. While it wasn’t the first time a digital disease wreaked havoc in a game—that distinction goes to The Sims’ notorious Guinea Pig Disease—it was the first of its scale. The game had behaved in a way that was not planned, and that could not be controlled. It was proof that the world was genuinely alive.

If the fiction and characters of the Warcraft games formed the tapestry that made up WoW's setting, it was a game called EverQuest that informed its genre. Developed by Sony Online Entertainment and released in 1999, EverQuest was one of the first really successful massively multiplayer online RPGs—games where players create characters and choose specializations before venturing out into a sprawling online world.

"EverQuest was the big thing in our office—it was absolutely ingenious, just a paradigm-changing product," says Metzen. Eventually someone at Blizzard threw it out there: Why not make a game like that, one that placed players in the middle of Warcraft as opposed to the bird’s-eye view of the earlier editions? "I lit up like a Christmas tree," Metzen recalls. "We were young and stupid and had no concept of how difficult it would be, but we decided that that was what we wanted to play and so that was what we were gonna build."

Ann has gotten used to people she meets online assuming she's a man. She partially chalks it up to her playstyle: Ann likes being a tank, a heavy-hitting damage dealer on the front lines.

"Tanks are always guys," Ann says. "Everyone knows that."

Ann is a 55-year-old retired civil servant who has been playing WoW since its inception with her husband, whom she met gaming online in Lineage, a 1998 MMO developed by South Korean studio NCSoft. Few of the people in their lives know this about them. Their friends and family don't play games and wouldn't necessarily get it, to Ann's chagrin.

"I don't understand why it's socially acceptable to watch 30 hours of TV a week," she says, "but if you're in a raiding guild, and you raid, like, 10 hours a week at a set time—that's weird."

This is why Ann asked that her last name and other potentially identifying details be omitted from this story. Her real-world social circle isn't particularly open-minded when it comes to gaming. "Since it's virtual, it's not real to them,” she says, wearily. “I just gave up trying to explain it."

Online, Ann’s experiences are very much real. She chats with the people in her raiding guild, all adults like her, about anything, really—like books they've read, or errands they have to run. Her husband, a less dedicated player, occasionally joins her after work to unwind. Together they do some of the game's more mundane tasks as they talk about each other's day.

"Part of what I like about WoW is that there are real people. There really is someone who has to go pick up their kid from Scouts," says Ann. "When we were doing raids, six out of 10 people in the raid were married. We had three married couples raiding. That's kind of cool. We'd all be hanging out together on a Friday night. I know that makes us all sound like losers or whatever, but we had a great time."

Over its first six years World of Warcraft’s community would swell to an astonishing peak of 12 million subscribers. But during that time a lot about the game changed—systems were tweaked, new character types were added, the world grew larger. This was out of necessity, since MMOs like World of Warcraft have a problem that other video games never really have to solve: they need to keep people around.

"Every month that someone feels like WoW doesn't have new content is a month they might decide, 'Eh. Not sure this is for me,'" says Cory Stockton, World of Warcraft's lead content designer, who joined Blizzard in 2005. As a result, games like WoW don't ever really end development. The team has to keep working on it, continually adding new features while addressing player concerns.

The biggest updates come in the form of expansion packs—full-priced additions that introduce whole new realms, playable races, and loads of story. The bulk of Stockton's work during his first few months at Blizzard in 2005 went toward designing those updates, in the form of both content patches and WoW's first expansion: The Burning Crusade.

Players were floored by The Burning Crusade’s additions: It introduced two races, the Draenei and Blood Elves, to the game's character types, and in the southeasternmost reaches of Azeroth, the Dark Portal opened the way into Outland, a new region for players to explore. And explore they did, purchasing 2.4 million copies of The Burning Crusade in 24 hours following its release on Jan. 15, 2007. But as the game's popularity skyrocketed, so did its profile—and concerned onlookers started to wonder if it wasn’t just new races and regions keeping users hooked.

If you Google "World of Warcraft addiction" and set the parameters for 2005, WoW’s first year in existence, one of the top news results is an Aug. 10 report of a 28-year-old South Korean man who died after a 50-hour gaming binge. Although he wasn't playing World of Warcraft, it was mentioned simply because it was the type of game that people reportedly played for 10 to 15 hours a day.

Two weeks later, news broke that China was looking to impose gaming curfews in order to combat gaming addiction, an increasingly severe problem that was uniquely visible in China due to the common use of Internet cafés to game. From that point onward, WoW quickly become synonymous with gaming addiction. A Google Trends search on “World of Warcraft addiction” shows that interest starts to turn up in the fall of 2005. Then there’s a dramatic spike in January 2007.

That was when The Burning Crusade was released.

Back before Felicia Day had starred on shows such as Supernatural, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and The Guild, or had launched her video site Geek and Sundry, she started playing World of Warcraft to bond with her brother. Around the time of WoW's release, as her career slowly gained momentum, she was living in California while her sibling was in Texas. Since there weren't many options for spending quality time together, she joined him in WoW. Day was no stranger to online gaming—she'd spent considerable time playing Multi-User Dungeons, a genre of text-based proto-MMOs. But WoW was different. She was floored.

"Everything was easy to get into," said Day. "That was the key to World of Warcraft—it was so easy to immerse yourself in. And that's what I did!"

For about two years, from the game's launch until around 2006, she fell into a period where she says she was addicted to the game. It got to a point where she was letting professional opportunities pass her by in favor of leveling up her characters.

"There were a lot of things happening in my life at the time,” says Day, “which made me play to excess. It was structured and gave me a sense of purpose. Then it got a bit overwhelming in my life, and I decided to quit—because I couldn't always be moderate about it. That’s just my personality."

Day started taking sketch-writing classes and working on a longform project that became The Guild, a Web series she describes as “Friends for gamers.” This was in 2007, and Web video was still a novelty—so Day and her collaborators were completely surprised when The Guild started to take off, eventually being distributed by Microsoft.

"I was most gratified when people came up to me and said, 'Hey, I gamed but I didn't tell my colleagues, but I decided to because of your show,' or 'I decided to get into games because of your show,' or 'I understand my boyfriend now,'" Day says. "Gaming culture can be closed off, because we're kind of all in our own little worlds. Making it more understandable to people on the outside will just make gaming culture more rich and, I think, games more popular."

Day doesn't attribute her addiction to any specific aspect of World of Warcraft but rather to her wiring and her situation at the time. To hear her tell it, if WoW wasn't there, the role it played in her life would have fallen to something else—perhaps another game. But videogames remain an easy scapegoat from reactionary pundits and cultural commentators. World of Warcraft was too good at what it set out to do—give players a world to lose themselves in, full of endless ways to pass the time. That made WoW an easy target as the debate over the amount of time people were spending online began to reach a fever pitch.

When asked about the first wave of public concern over World of Warcraft addiction, Metzen goes quiet. It's brief, but noticeable—Metzen typically talks about WoW with an infectious, unwavering enthusiasm. He wants everyone to become engrossed in the stories he and Blizzard dreamed up. It’s not surprising that he finds the idea of people becoming too engrossed upsetting.

"It caught us off guard. It totally did," Metzen says. "But we happened to be one of those products that broke through the wall. Anybody breaking through the wall would have had to face that change."

There’s no question that WoW came along at a watershed moment in gaming history, when the medium was experiencing unprecedented growth and change. In 2004 game consoles were already connected to the Web, and playing with other people online was increasingly becoming the norm: Halo 2 came out two weeks before WoW and immediately elevated the “online multiplayer” mode from curiosity to necessary feature.

But WoW and other MMOs were the focal point of claims that the games facilitated addiction due to the prevalence of Skinner Box-like mechanisms in their design. In layman's terms, they perpetually dangle a digital carrot on a stick. In WoW, as in any other MMORPG, there's always another level to gain, a new gear to find, another quest to complete. It’s a technique that virtually all games now employ in some form. It plays to our completist tendencies, forever reminding us of all that remains to be done. Progress offers a quick hit.

This is a truth of the world we live in: Our day-to-day lives are being gamified; the wiring of our brains is being exploited daily to hook us. It's why we constantly check our phones or social-media accounts—notification icons have us trapped in a closed dopamine loop, endlessly seeking gratification. This presents a unique problem for game developers. They want their games to be sticky, but they leave themselves open to criticism if they're just interested in hooking players without offering anything meaningful in return.

"We try to be an ethical shop. We want to do good business, want to be good partners, want to be good developers," says Metzen, who remembers a similar gaming controversy from his youth: the Dungeons & Dragons "satanic panic.”

"So as these kinds of issues began to come up, we had to stop and reassess what we were doing. There is a responsibility to try and develop product as conscionably as we can, and though that had always been true, it became even more so at the realization of this scale.”

Even as modern life keeps us online for increasingly long amounts of time,concern for gaming addiction persists. Just last summer, HBO released a documentary called Love Child, complete with an ominous trailer that offers a less-than-rosy portrayal of the lives of gamers:

It's a worst-case example of videogame excess—a couple who allowed their real-life child to die while they cared for a digital one—and it plays into oft-cited fears of "emotional shutdown and withdrawal."

Yet despite the movie’s bleak depiction of gaming addiction, discussion on the subject is becoming more nuanced. As Washington Post critic Alyssa Rosenberg wrote in response to the film:

"Policymakers should take a lesson from the film anyway, and remember that when something terrible involving an obsessive gamer happens, video games are more likely a symptom of larger issues than a cause."

Acknowledging that fact doesn’t absolve game developers of responsibility for the content they produce. It just frames it more appropriately.

As is the case when discussing any addiction, blaming the abused substance—be it drugs or Warcraft—can be dangerously reductive. There are deeper issues that need to be dealt with on the individual level, and if nothing else, the conversation surrounding videogame addiction will help raise awareness and facilitate better treatment. Studios can be more mindful of how their products are being consumed and encourage safe practices, but ultimately, there’s only so much a developer can do within the context of making fun, innovative videogames. Addictiveness is both a feature and a bug. That’s a tricky line to walk.

There's a reason MMOs like World of Warcraft are an easy target for those concerned about the looming specter of online addiction: There’s no way to “beat” them. With the level of support Blizzard affords WoW and the number of players still populating its servers, there is always something to do. Users can begin playing through it casually and then, if so compelled, work toward the more challenging, competitive aspects of the game. There’s no shortage of opportunities to take on the game's biggest challenges and see what's called "endgame" content. All that’s required is dedicating a ton of time to playing.

Chris Kluwe is very familiar with the demands of competing at an extremely high level: From 2005 to ’12 the UCLA grad was an NFL punter for the Minnesota Vikings. But during that same period of time, he was also heavily into World of Warcraft. A huge fan of MMOs, Kluwe had sunk time into every major title, from Ultima Online to Dark Age of Camelot. Eventually his attention turned to WoW.

"My dad actually told me about it," says Kluwe. "He's not a gamer at all, and the only game that grabbed him was Everquest—he was absolutely addicted to Everquest. He said one of the top EQ guys was consulting on WoW…. It was going to be something big." So he signed up, and fell in love with the game.

It wouldn't be long before the übercompetitive Kluwe became eager to tackle the kind of tougher endgame content that would require a larger time investment than his circle of friends was willing to make. So he decided to try and get into the Flying Hellfish, one of the top-ranked raiding guilds in the country (now defunct), in order to take on WoW's most intense challenges with a group of people who meant business. "That was the one time in my life,” he says, “that I pulled the 'Hey, I'm an NFL player, can I get in?’ card." It worked.

Kluwe liked being on what he called "the bleeding edge" of WoW for a bit, but it was demanding. He'd be up until two or three in the morning and then head in for practice with the Vikings the next day. It was a challenge he was up to, but also one he couldn't sustain forever—he quit playing World of Warcraft after the birth of his second daughter in order to devote more time to his family.

"MMOs demand a time investment from you, and once you invest that time, you become really attached to your character and your community," says Kluwe, whose Twitter handle is still @ChrisWarcraft. "If your community doesn't go anywhere, well, you're probably not going to go anywhere. But sometimes people move on." Sometimes they have to.

The latest WoW expansion, Warlords of Draenor, was released in November 2014, with Blizzard hoping that the new offerings would help win back lapsed players. At the time, the number of subscribers—estimated to be around 7.4 million—was still unparalleled in the MMO space, but paled in comparison to 2010's 12 million.

"That's to be expected. Nothing stays at 10 forever," says Metzen. "In many ways I view it like Dungeons & Dragons—the fifth edition just came out, after many years. It's like this warm, comfortable thing that's always there in life. Sometimes it's red-hot, and sometimes I fall away—but it's as near as me picking up that Player's Handbook and diving back in."

Blizzard's belief that Warlords of Draenor would lure players back would ultimately be proved right: Within days of its release, WoW's subscriber count rocketed back up to 10 million, a spike that has become a pretty regular phenomenon in the game's life cycle. Yet even as WoW has settled into a rhythm, it remains a singular success story. There's a digital graveyard full of MMORPGs that emerged during WoW’s life span, and a number of other titles are still vying for success in its shadow. These include two MMOs based on Star Wars (the now-defunct Star Wars Galaxies and Star Wars: The Old Republic), an MMO based on The Elder Scrolls—which, like WoW, hails from a line of beloved single-player games—and a litany of titles based on popular franchises: DC Universe Online, Star Trek Online, The Matrix Online, two Final Fantasy offerings…the list goes on.

The "WoW Killer" has become the mythical beast of the industry—that unicorn of a game that does everything right and becomes an even bigger phenomenon than World of Warcraft. So why hasn't it shown up by now? Is WoW really lightning in a bottle, an alchemy of sticky game design and engrossing fiction that’s impossible to replicate?

Perhaps, especially considering that a common criticism of these games is that they feel too much like WoW. But it stands to reason that the answer is even simpler. Consider the year World of Warcraft launched: 2004. Think of all the online entertainment options available now that didn’t exist a decade ago. As Ian Williams argues over at Paste, much of World of Warcraft's success can be attributed to taking root in a time before online interaction became the norm and "Web 2.0" was still a buzzword.

"It wasn’t the game, it was the moment," writes Williams, "not what MMOs were but when. It’s terribly, unsatisfyingly handwavey to say, but it was the zeitgeist and now it’s not."

To Williams, every MMO released from November 2004 to the present is tilting at windmills, chasing after intoxicatingly high subscriber numbers that will never be reached because the thing that ardent fans love about the games—community—is readily available elsewhere. Use a hashtag, post to a subreddit, start a Tumblr—finding community online is no longer difficult.

In fact, games are exploding in ways they never have before. Minecraft is this generation's Super Mario Bros., and Twitch, the live broadcasting service, serves as a social hub for game players around the world. League of Legends is one of the most popular games in the world, with 27 million players logging in every day. It’s an entirely different kind of game from World of Warcraft—a multiplayer online battle arena, in genre parlance. It's also built on the free-to-play business model that first became popular in Facebook games like Farmville and essentially gutted the subscription format that MMOs traditionally relied on.

It's hard to overstate the effect this shifting business model had on MMOs. When more and more of the most popular games in the world are letting people play for free, a subscription model quickly becomes a bridge too far. In fact, an astounding number of subscription MMOs have introduced some form of free-to-play option—even World of Warcraft, albeit in an extremely limited fashion.

The inability to duplicate WoW’s success may also be because there are only so many things that can be done with an MMORPG, and World of Warcraft has done most of them. According to game developer and MMO expert Ralph Koster, World of Warcraft is one of the great paradoxes of gaming: It's the shining example of all an MMO can be, but its success is the very reason why the genre has stagnated, and may very well be dead. As he wrote on his blog earlier in 2014, the game "sucks all the oxygen out of the room" by virtue of its largesse and entrenched community. Creating an MMO to best it would require a level of resources that no one really has:

Essentially, World of Warcraft has become Facebook: too big and thoroughly entrenched in the Web community’s digital lives to ever be challenged. You can't compete with Facebook by trying to do the same thing as Facebook. You have to do something entirely different. So you make a Snapchat or a Vine or a Whisper. Eventually, if you get enough people luring cool kids away from the giant shopping mall and into hip boutiques, the mall stops being cool.

Chris Metzen is aware of this, but it doesn't seem to bother him. He's someone who says he couldn’t care less about numbers. When he talks about World of Warcraft, he doesn't talk about it like something he dreamed up the way he talks about the stories and histories behind Warcraft II or III. Instead, at every possible juncture, he talks about the community, because while he and the immense team at Blizzard provided the raw materials, the game really belongs to the 10 million people playing it.

"I hope that players jumping in these days find the water warm. I hope that they find fun, friendly people, and that that becomes a reason to keep coming back," says Metzen. "More than the clarity of the product, the soundness of its design, the sureness of its infrastructure as a live service. All of these things are important, and boy, I hope they're firing on all cylinders. But it's the people part. It's the relationships, it's the friends you make. That's what I hope for people jumping in; it's that they find that swiftly, and they find it rewarding."

By most accounts, that experience still exists. The question is just for how much longer. Blizzard is unsure of how to move forward with their biggest game, experimenting with ways to modify the WoW business model in a manner that's more palatable to the modern online gaming experience, where free-to-play reigns supreme. When asked to talk about it, Blizzard declined to comment./p>

But for now, Azeroth is still there, still changing and growing, full of players new and old and lapsed alike. It may be a relic of a time when our options for finding one another to bond over a shared experience were far more limited, far more challenging, and far less ubiquitous. But even so, it’s still creating stories.