Blizzard has announced that it will disable World of Warcraft's Twitter integration feature, which allows players to tweet about achievements, rare finds, and other activities directly from within the game.

"Over the next two days, we will be updating World of Warcraft to remove the integrated Twitter posting feature," community manager Kaivax posted on the WoW forums (opens in new tab). 'After this small update, the ability to tweet from within the game will no longer be available, and the setting to save your Twitter credentials will no longer be visible. This does not require any action by the player."

Kaivax's message was posted on February 7, so this feature should now be disabled.

World of Warcraft integrated with Twitter (opens in new tab) in 2015 as part of the 6.1 update. From the responses to the closure announcement, it does not appear to be a particularly popular feature, but some users in their replies say they tweet from within the game at least occasionally.

Blizzard did not give a reason for shutting down the feature, but widely accepted speculation is that it is due to planned changes to the Twitter API. Access to the API, which allows for things like our favorite Twitter bots (open in new tab), has been free, but on February 2, Twitter announced that it will end free access to the API (open in new tab) and introduce a "paid base tier." This change was scheduled to take place on February 9, which was also the day WoW's Twitter support was removed.

Twitter unexpectedly changed the direction of this plan yesterday, announcing that it would extend access to its current free API until February 13 (opens in new tab) and then roll out a "new form of free access." However, it will be very restrictive, limiting tweet creation to "1500 tweets per month per authenticated user token. "I don't know how much traffic WoW's integrated tweeting feature will generate, but as one user noted, roughly "1 hour 2 tweets per hour, per application, per user." That might be enough for a medium-sized novelty bot, but I doubt it would meet the requirements of a large MMO.

Blizzard could pay for access to the API, but even if they were interested in doing so, it doesn't seem to make much sense; Twitter itself has been a complete gong show lately, and last night the entire platform broke for several hours for mysterious reasons and was completely rudderless It was in a state: after reversing its decision to discontinue free access to its API, Twitter announced a $100/month "low-level" access program (opens in new tab). The premium Twitter API will also end on February 13, but subscribers can apply for access to the higher-level (and much more expensive) enterprise API instead.

Meanwhile, Twitter itself is losing users that cannot be ignored (opens in new tab) and this pattern is expected to grow over the next two years (opens in new tab). Ultimately, this leads to a very simple question: why would Blizzard (or frankly, anyone) pay for it?

I contacted Blizzard and asked if the removal of WoW's Twitter integration was related to the upcoming API changes.