Who owns World of Warcraft? Answered

You’ve heard of World of Warcraft before if you’re deep into the video game well. It’s a mega-popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game based around the mega-popular Warcraft franchise, a series of Real-Time Strategy games from the late ’90s. World of Warcraft features a long storyline combining fantasy, exploration, and combat between magical beings and sword-wielding monstrosities. Who created this game? Who owns the World of Warcraft? Read on for a brief history lesson.

The short answer is Blizzard Entertainment, now known as Activision-Blizzard, is the company that owns World of Warcraft. First launched in 2004, WoW was created as a competitor to the most popular MMO at that time — Everquest. Featuring similar tropes such as dungeon-delving and rare loot searching, World of Warcraft came with some quality of life features that Everquest, at the time, did not have, such as not losing experience when you die. Activision, the company most notable for its Call of Duty franchise, merged with Vivendi Games in 2008, picking up Blizzard Entertainment and reforming it as Activision-Blizzard. Nearly 20 years later, World of Warcraft is still going strong, with multiple millions of players enjoying the latest expansion: Shadowlands.

For those interested, getting into World of Warcraft as a complete newbie isn’t particularly demanding. There’s a free trial that lets you play through content not related to Shadowlands up to level 20 and various classes, from magic-slinging Mages to axe-swinging Warriors, for you to try with little commitment — only a few hours, at most. However, to level past 20, you will need an active subscription, and to play in the Shadowlands, you’ll have to purchase the expansion. There are literally decades of content to explore, however, so you’ll likely never run out of things to do if you’re interested in exploration, player-versus-player combat, Pokemon-inspired battling and collecting, and more.