World of Warcraft sells more than 600,000 units

Blizzard Entertainment today announced that its massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft eclipsed sales of 600,000 units across North America, Australia, and New Zealand during the holiday season.

The game, which was GameSpot's 2004 Game of the Year, has been in high demand since November 23, a day that saw it sell more than 240,000 copies in its first 24 hours of release.

"The public's response to World of Warcraft has been simply amazing," said Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment. "We are very proud and excited to see such an overwhelming demand for the game, and we hope that the enthusiasm continues to build as we further enhance our online service."

The game also achieved another milestone: more than 200,000 concurrent players over the holidays (which breaks the previous record for an online game). To accommodate the high volume of users, Blizzard will be setting up more servers and will begin shipping additional copies of the game to retailers "after a short and successful testing period to ensure server stability."

Blizzard will continue to produce content for the game on a regular basis, with the next major update expected to be the addition of player-versus-player combat in specific battlegrounds.

For more information on World of Warcraft, check out GameSpot's previous coverage.