World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer online RPG, turns 20 years old. Here’s what it’s meant to us

As World of Warcraft turns 20 , its enduring financial success arguably pales in comparison to its cultural significance.

The game that redefined gold mining for the 21st century is still a 19th-century gold mine for its landlords.

It helped popularize the unassailable business logic that having your customers pay you once was worse than having them pay you until they decided or remembered to stop.

World of Warcraft was a primordial example of the modern phenomenon where a corporation exploits its intellectual property by jumping genres and colonizing a new medium.

The elaborate crafting system in the game often required materials gained through repetitive in-game labor.

One reason this all worked is that you were often helping out real people, with “legitimate needs” in the scope of the game.

World of Warcraft is a persistent software ecosystem with clients and servers and all kinds of data flying between them at all times.

An entire cottage industry of user-created UI mods sprung up to assign repeatable actions to shortcut keys.

For those who did, the only way to follow the expected meta of guild raids was to use externally designed add-ons.