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:

In some ways it was the apotheosis of this game design. Today, the influence is everywhere. To be an MMO has come to mean to be like World of Warcraft. The quest-driven advancement path. The tried and true combat mechanic and the raids. The interface must now conform, much as how FPSes on PC were forever condemned to WASD based on the popularity of specific games. WoW is now the template and the bar that everything must hit … It is the genre king, and likely will never be toppled by a game like it, as long as investment in it continues. We likely will not see true reinvention come to the space until there are massive changes in content delivery, such as near-unlimited cloud server power, or virtual reality displays, that both permit and force truly different experiences to be created.

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.