World of Warcraft turns 20 and is still the most popular role-playing game in the world.

Exactly 20 years ago, on November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft was released, quickly becoming the most popular online role-playing game in the world – a status it retains to this day. To date, the number of its users is estimated to be more than 7 million.

Image source: worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com

Development of World of Warcraft (WoW) began in the late nineties, when Blizzard Entertainment, responsible for it, had already released such popular titles as Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft. After the release of Starcraft, the studio was divided into two parts: one to work on Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos, and the second to a certain project that subsequently failed, and at that moment WoW is believed to have been born. The developers themselves were keen on online games back then; the most popular were Ultima Online, Lineage and Everquest.

Blizzard was part of the Vivendi conglomerate, and he was not very keen to pour funds into the gaming direction. As a result, the development conditions for the future cult game were spartan: burnt-out light bulbs in the office, food trampled into the carpet, a small microwave and a sink littered with dishes instead of a kitchen. Initially, about 40 people worked on WoW, making decisions together, some of which failed and cost a lot of money; closer to release, the number of developers doubled.

WoW was released in North America, Australia and South Korea on November 23, 2024, the game was released in Europe in February 2025, and in China in June. Already in January the number of players reached 600 thousand, in September – 4 million, including 1 million in North America and 1.5 million in China. It took less than a year for WoW to become the most popular role-playing game in the world, a status it still maintains to this day. In 2007, the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, was released—2.4 million copies were sold in the first 24 hours, and 3.5 million in the first month. In 2010, when the Cataclysm expansion was released, the number of subscribers reached a record high of 12 million, but then it began to decline; in the first half of 2015, the number of subscribers fell by 44% to 5.6 million. Since then, the company, now called Activision Blizzard, has stopped disclosing this figure.

During this time, many remarkable events took place in the world of online gaming. So, in 2005 there was a pandemic. During one of the raids, the boss applied the Corrupted Blood effect to the players, due to which their health was gradually taken away. The “curse” was passed from one player to another; it was originally supposed to last 10 seconds, but due to a bug, the effect lasted indefinitely – they became infected and became contagious, but did not die, even non-player characters. A week later, the company had to reboot the servers, and researchers, having studied the incident, published a scientific article in 2007 about the characteristics of human behavior during a pandemic.

The cost of a WoW subscription remains the same from day one – it is $15 per month or $13 per month if paid annually. From the time of release until now, players have spent 1 billion days in Azeroth, the planet on which WoW takes place, the developers have calculated. As of spring 2024, the number of paying users is estimated to be around 7.25 million.