Starcraft II sells 721,000 at US retailers in two days

Last week, Blizzard Entertainment announced that Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty was the "fastest-selling strategy game of all time," having sold through 1.5 million units in just 48 hours. Today, as party of its July sales report, the NPD Group revealed that nearly half that number--some 721,000 units--was sold at retail in the US for the PC and Mac. The figure was only for boxed retail copies of the sci-fi real-time strategy game and did not include digital copies of the sci-fi real-time strategy game sold directly from Blizzard Entertainment's online store.

Starcraft II is now the bestselling PC game of 2010, but its debut is only the beginning. Analysts have big expectations for Blizzard's latest, with estimates for the game's 2010 sales total reaching as high as 6.5 million copies.

As the first new stand-alone game from Blizzard since 2004's World of Warcraft, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty focuses primarily on the human Terran faction with a 29-mission single-player campaign. However, the multiplayer component also lets gamers wage interstellar real-time strategy warfare as the hivelike Zerg and the technologically advanced Protoss factions. Two sequels focusing on those factions--Legacy of the Void and Heart of the Swarm--are also in development.