Blizzard Is Shutting Down WoW's In-Game Twitter Integration

World of Warcraft is losing its built-in Twitter support, likely in response to Twitter's plan to charge developers for access to the social media site's API.

In a forum post, Blizzard explained that the feature will be automatically removed over the course of the next few days, after which the ability to tweet in-game will no longer be available.

The ability to tweet from Azeroth was added in 2015 as part patch 6.1, during the game's Warlords of Draenor expansion. The feature allowed users to take selfies or other in-game screenshots, accompanied by text and Instagram-style filters, from within Blizzard's MMORPG. Judging from many of the responses to the news on Blizzard's official forum post, it doesn't seem like the feature will be terribly missed, with numerous players remarking how they forgot the feature even existed.

Blizzard didn't explain why the game's Twitter integration is being removed, but it is likely due to a proposed plan from Twitter that would see Twitter begin charging developers a monthly fee for access to the website's API. Despite the shift having been announced a week ago and the change scheduled to take place on February 9, no further details on pricing or what specifically is changing have been revealed as of writing.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who has ushered in sweeping changes to the social media platform since taking over in October 2022, has recently indicated that some kind of free API support will continue to exist for "bots providing good content that is free" on Twitter, but has failed to elaborate further. Considering Blizzard and WoW exist to make money, it seems safe to assume that WoW's in-game Twitter functionality would not qualify for access to a free version of Twitter's API. Musk has proposed charging developers up to $100 a month for "API access with ID verification" in an effort to reduce crack down on what he calls "bot scammers" and "opinion manipulators."

If Musk's comments about pricing do turn out to be true, it hardly seems worth it for Blizzard to potentially pay upwards of $1,000 or more yearly to keep the feature running considering WoW's Twitter functionality isn't widely used.

WoW may be losing a feature, but it recently gained a major new one with the addition of the Trading Post. The Trading Post adds a battle-pass-like series of monthly challenges to the MMO, which when completed grant players a special currency that can be used to buy premium cosmetics that rotate on a monthly basis. Activision Blizzard recently announced that WoW's latest expansion, Dragonflight, sold less than the game's previous expansion, although subscriber retention is higher compared to other recent expansion releases.