World of Warcraft takes on Europe

Blizzard today announced that its PC massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft is breaking records in Europe, just days after its February 11 launch. Like a horde of rampaging orcs, World of Warcraft is taking over the online gaming world region by region.

Fresh off its conquest of American online gamers, World of Warcraft sold an estimated 280,000 copies of the game on its first day of release, a record for an online game, and finished the weekend topping more than 380,000 units. The first-day sales numbers were greater than what analysts previously thought the entire European MMORPG market would be.

World of Warcraft also broke records for the most accounts created (more than 290,000), for the most concurrent users (more than 180,000), and for the most servers used (more than 80).

Since its North American launch, World of Warcraft has sold more than 600,000 copies, logged more than 200,000 concurrent players, and forced Blizzard to dedicate more servers to the game after delays left several players unable to log in and stuck in reality.

To see why World of Warcraft is so wildly popular and won GameSpot's Game of the Year for 2004, read Greg Kasavin's full review.