WoW: Losing Twitter Functionality

Currently, World of Warcraft's built-in Twitter support is reducing. This may have happened in response to a Twitter plan to charge developers for access to the social media site's API.

Blizzard explained the matter in a forum thread. This feature will be automatically removed over the next few days, after which you will no longer be able to post tweets into the game.

In 2015, during the Warlords of Draenor expansion, as part of patch 6.1, a new feature was added to the game where you could tweet from Azeroth. The effect of this function is that you can take a selfie in Blizzard's MMORPG or take a screenshot of the screen of other games, then use Instagram-style filters and match the corresponding text, so that a tweet is born. From Blizzard's official forum thread, we can see a lot of responses to this news, but we can know that the official does not miss this feature very much. Moreover, many players also say that they have forgotten that this function exists in the game.

Blizzard did not provide an explanation for why it removed the game's Twitter integration. But I'm guessing it's most likely due to Twitter's plan to charge developers to access the social media site's API. You probably knew about the shift a week ago, and Twitter was scheduled to do it yesterday, but then extended it to February 13th.

Since taking office in October 2022, Twitter CEO Elon Musk will make a radical change to the social media platform this time. Recently, he also said that he would provide some kind of free API support for "bots that provide free premium content" on Twitter, but didn't elaborate on that. Since WoW and Blizzard exist partly to make money, then we can imagine a situation where World of Warcraft's in-game Twitter feature won't be able to access the free version of the Twitter API in the future. In addition, Musk also proposed to charge developers $100 a month for API access in the future to reduce spam in the Twitter API, thereby improving quality and achieving a prosperous ecosystem.

Yesterday, Musk's remarks have been confirmed. Well, considering that few players use WoW's Twitter feature, Blizzard has to pay over $1,000 or more per year to keep it working well, and it doesn't seem like it's worth it.

While WoW may lose Twitter in the future, it recently added Trading Post, which could give it a new feature. This new feature is a series of monthly challenges, sort of like a battle pass. After you complete the monthly challenges, the game will reward you with a special currency that can be used to obtain premium cosmetics that rotate each month. Besides, you can also use WoW Gold or WoW Items to get other equipment you need to improve your overall strength.Recently, Activision Blizzard stated that WoW's latest expansion, Dragonflight, had lower sales than previous expansions for the game, despite having a higher subscriber retention rate.