How World of Warcraft changed the real world

Twenty years ago, Blizzard Entertainment launched World of Warcraft, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game that brought together millions of users from all corners of earth to the fictional planet of Azeroth. Since then, the video game has left its mark on the industry and an entire generation of gamers.

In the mid 2000s, Josh Kaufman was in his 20s, working, researching for his book “The Personal MBA” and playing World of Warcraft. 

“This is what I did to blow off some steam in the evenings,” Kaufman said.

While playing the game, he noticed it wasn’t far off from running a business.

“As a player in Warcraft, you’re creating valuable items, and you’re marketing and selling them, and you’re delivering them to other players who are paying you for them, and you’re receiving currency,” he said.

World of Warcraft can also be helpful for understanding the bigger, macroeconomic picture of it all. USC professor Dmitri Williams said watching players interact in that world was like having a petri dish for studying economics and human behavior. 

“If you are, you know, the god of this world, you’re programming it, you’d be like, you know, I’m going to raise the price of potions, and we’re going to see what happens to supply and demand. You can run experiments in a way the Fed can’t do,” Williams said.

The game was also a way, before social media really took off, to socialize online.

“Now you had this just virtual space, this digital environment that you could explore for hours,” said NYU professor Joost van Druenen. “And so that’s, you know, what my friends and I would do, you know. We would almost forfeit our time playing pool at the bar, and instead all go to our respective little rooms in the East Village and go play World of Warcraft.”

It also took gaming into the mainstream, said van Druenen.

“They just managed to plug into this moment, this cultural moment, making it one of the most successful multiplayer online games in the history of the industry,” he said.

World of Warcraft also proved the viability of a new business model for the video game industry, said Jesper Juul, video game theorist with the Royal Danish Academy.  

“World of Warcraft was the first kind of, first game in the West that became, like, really a phenomenon, but was based on subscriptions rather than just on the upfront purchase,” Juul said.

While subscriptions are now popular for many kinds of media, it wasn’t so common back then, said Mat Piscatella, a video game industry analyst with Circana.

“At the time, the idea of paying an upfront fee to get into the game by purchasing the game, and then having the additional monthly service fee was pretty revolutionary, and, of course, very appealing to video game companies that all tried to copy the formula,” Piscatella said.

And many of World of Warcraft’s subscribers have stuck around, he said, in part because of the strong communities that developed years ago.