Third expansion to 12-million-subscriber World of Warcraft sets new PC sales record with triple-platinum opening-day performance.
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade set PC sales records upon its release in January 2007, selling 2.4 million units worldwide within 24 hours. In November 2008, Blizzard Entertainment trumped its own high-water mark, when Wrath of the Lich King sold 2.8 million units in a single day.
With the third expansion to its 12-million-subscriber-strong massively multiplayer online role-playing game on store shelves last week, Blizzard has confirmed that the streak has continued. Today, the Activision sister company announced that World of Warcraft: Cataclysm sold more than 3.3 million units worldwide through both retail and digital channels within 24 hours of release. Blizzard notes that this sales pace earns Cataclysm the title of "fastest-selling PC game of all time."
The third expansion to 2004's top-rated MMORPG, Cataclysm adds a host of new features to the title. Chief among the changes is the total overhaul of the in-game environment. Azeroth has been ravaged, and popular locales have been drastically altered, making the old new again. The expansion also ups the level cap to 85 and adds two new races to the title: goblins and worgen.
This year has been a strong one for Blizzard. In July, the Irvine, California-based studio released Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first installment in a trilogy of releases for its sci-fi real-time strategy franchise. The game achieved sales of 1.5 million within 48 hours of release, eventually selling 3 million units worldwide by the end of September.
Blizzard has not yet begun talking about the next expansion to World of Warcraft, even if it believes that add-ons to the MMORPG could continue "as long as the Internet is up." However, according to what purports to be a leaked release calendar, Blizzard intends to launch Cataclysm's follow-up during the April-June quarter in 2012.
Cataclysm is currently available in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Europe, Russia, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Korea, as well as the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. For more information, check out GameSpot's previous coverage of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.
Tom Magrino has covered the games industry since 2006. He's been compared to Steve Martin by Ozzy Osbourne and Daniel Craig by Tim Schafer. His voice, heard largely on GameSpot's podcast, recalls that of Kermit the Frog. It ain't easy bein' Magreen.
It's been years since I played WOW. I played the burning crusade and then sold off my character a month after reaching max level. WOW to me is the greatest MMO ever invented and I knew it would be the day Blizzard announced they were making one. Maybe I'll play this again who knows I've always just liked the leveling/questing aspect of WOW. Once I reach max level everything gets to complicated and boring for me so I move on. Don't feel like trying to join a guild and do all the raids and crap.
I had no idea there were 3.3 million repressed and socially inept people around the place. Makes sense though.....lol.
i cant play that game anymore. i put over 4 years into that game thats crazy. www.dummydeadguy.com
blizzard could sell a million toasters for $49.95 if they put world of warcraft in front of it's name, not a knock on blizzard or fans. an alliance or horde toaster would be the greatest toaster ever
id say wow has turned into a very very very easy game and a fast one too....it gettin boring....nooby and very cheap...and no offence for wow players but...really think of it...i was a player...a gd one and stopped now coz of this....
12million at $15.00/per month. You would think that the price would start coming down on this cash cow.
Lol... who plays original wow? I mean?... it sux... why can't anyone see it? geez... Blizzard should make pretbc servers like the vanilla servers... the original wow was so epic
I did try the expansion a bit. I was one of the 24 million but to be honest WOW bores me for some reason. I look forward to the SWTOR more just hope Bioware/etc. doesn't muck that one up and make it another Age of Conan.
For the old school players, I recommend at least trying the new dungeons on a friends computer or something. CC and kill orders really are back :) They have definitely simplified the interface and made things far more accessble, but the end game content so far is nothing if not challenging. I find that the people bagging the game have usually never played it. Questing like always is on the tedious side, but it's a very nice expansion so far.
meh seen it fell asleep lol WoW used to be good till more and more kids got a subscription which they ruined the community and moaned it was too hard bah now its just easy drops nothing realy new to offer they even KIlled the RP servers lol i agree with Sammoth lol and drummerdickens for FF14 :P screw WoW its gay haha *can't wait to see all the dislikes*
@vahnglenn2008 Stupidest thing I ever heard is calling someone who disagrees with someone un-American. We live in a country to make "CHOICES". We Value Opinions of others even if we don't like them. I think My statement was true and to the point and very American in it's own way. Funny thing is if you actually read my comment I was not bashing WOW just stating some facts that is all.
@vahnglenn2008 Wow Just Wow "Learn2Read" where did I say WOW sucked ???? Seriously get over yourself people are just stating opnions is all. People have a right to agree or not agree.
You don't have to be rich to play WoW. $15 a month for anyone with an average job is almost nothing. At $12/hr, that's an hour and fifteen minutes of work out of your entire monthly schedule.
When WoW was released it did something that almost NO mmo did... it played well on an average computer. Most MMO's are designed for bleeding edge systems upon release which limits 99% of the paying public... smart move Blizzard, you know your clients well.
3.3m in just the first day alone? WOW - no pun intended Most games go their whole store life and never get near that kind of total.
@smfes that's right! best thing about PC gaming is that PC can do pretty much all consoles can do, plus hundreds of more things! and for gaming, PC plays always all XBOX 360 titles, most of ps3 titles, and a lot lot more like PC titles that can never be played in both said consoles like WoW =). so Go PC Gaming!
it will beat grand turismo 5 sales and people says pc gaming is dead gt5 shipped 5 million not sold it takes 48 days.go pc gaming
The problem with WoW lies with the players and not the game. I'm older than most players on there and fortunately unlike most WoW players i can't play each evening for 3/4 hours a night and don't find 'anal' jokes funny. In WOTLK i found it difficult to get into raids as i didn't have the required achievement and all 'pugs' are full of idiots waiting to blame healers when they're clearly stood in the wrong place. Enjoying LOTRO myself currently. Free to play and the players appear to be a good few years older than the average WoW player.
I would say the one thing that I would like to see from WoW is more difficulty options. It would be great if they opened up 'hero' servers that would ramp the difficulty up for those of us who would like more overall challenge. I wouldn't suggest necessarily that the change a single thing at all for the standard WoW as I would expect for most people the difficulty is about right. It also seems to me, without hard evidence, that the new race area starts are a little more difficult but nothing insane. At the same time I don't recall any other other MMORPG's being extremely hard or anything like that. I will say that Blizzard really stepped up the story telling and for the Wergen Alliance race the storyline starts to close the gap between WoW and games like Baulder's Gate. And if anything that is where Blizzard really needed to step up. Most simply don't measure to WoW because their servers hold like a fraction of the people and there are holes in the leveling content that really make it feel like a grind. Then of course no MMORPG even comes close to the end game content that WoW has. War Hammer Online is pretty good for PVP for early level characters but WoW closed the gap quite a bit since WAR launched. Then if you go out and do the single player quests in WAR you are essentially alone on most servers. Guild wars is pretty darn good... but it kind of loses the 'world' feeling as so much of the game is instanced and the way you get between areas a bit convoluted.
I've pl,ayed wow Sence patch 1.8 I enjoy the game but as Sammoth said we are Ither "Addicts" or people that just "log on to log on" Ive played other MMO while playing wow and I will admit The game is too easy it even amazes me that people can suck at it. Now I havent seen raids or done many instances so far this exspansion but in the last exsansion WOTL Raids and instances were so easy that on my 3 tank toons I could run in Grab 7 groups of mobs and live by AOEing them down with DPS and a healer. I hear and have seen from some instances that its changed But if there was a better MMO I could play I would WOW Isnt That great and too me lost its tuch when "Blizzard activsion" came along in BC. I noticed That The game was getting easyer and easyer every day after the merge and I disliked it But I still played something still keeps me playing I no longer raid and Quit raiding last expsansion before Tier 8 content ALl in all from a wow player I say WOW is Crap and we need something new untill then I will LOg in to just Log in and level
@Stoneys_Rock To each there own but the fact is Conan does everything Wow does only better. also. bugs are fixed. everything works great. Conan = better combat (gory finishing moves) better graphics more customization more mature community, with blood and nudity. which ultimately leads to better pvp, and more variety in players who look completely different from one another. For me, Wow was ruined when I seen there were 4 faces to choose from that virtually looked the same.
@Hillsy_ WoW requires a unique code to properly function, if this were not the case the ilegal copies would be a lot more and the sales considerably lower. @Macrinus88 "Waste your life" and "no point" is coming to a post of a game you hate just for trolling. You are the one who really needs to get a life, come on dude! stop trolling. :)
@DuaneDog Fully agreed. People just hate this game because it got massive and succesful. You know, 5 years ago playing WoW was cool because was trendy. Playing it now is bad because everyone plays it and, by hating it, they want to show how different, special and oposite to the masses they are (as oposite as another 50.000 wow haters on the internet). Of course, you may not like it, we all have different tastes after all. But saying this game is bad... well, you kinda destroy your credibility at objectively "reviewing" games by saying it I'm affraid. They may like it ro not; but people keeps playing WoW after all this time because is still fun, it is still entertaining, they keep adding more content and it's quality both in game content and artistical aspects are just great. Cheers.
I'd still like to pick the expansion up sometime, but I've got plenty of other games to play anyway. I don't exactly have a full group of friends to play the game with right now anyway. @Wexorian , my best guess would be that there will be 2 or 3 more WOW expansions, and Blizzard will try to hit their annual release window at the end of every year to get them out. I'm expecting the level cap to hit 99 or 100 by the end of WOW.
Blizzard should finish warcraft story after next 2 expansion i think, yes they can continue story and raise level cap as again and again but i think it can ruin game, like diablo 3 will end on its 2nd expansion warcrat story shall end sometime too.
Just goes to show you, PC games do sell if they make a game worthy enough, or meets the gamers needs.
First-week sales of latest World of Warcraft expansion boosts global subscriber base to over 10 million; Blizzard Entertainment claims "growth across all major regions."
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