The expansion had been selling via pre-orders for a long time. That is the number of units they were able to recognize revenue on due to having shipped the product on November 23rd. Since then digital sales and pre-orders have been my thing and have no doubt come to dominate the sales numbers.īecause, technically, that 3.7 million number isn’t the first day sales number. But I haven’t been down to a retail store to buy a physical box for a WoW expansion since WotLK. I recall a pallet of TBC collector’s edition boxes sitting on the floor at Fry’s in Sunnyvale the day it launched. I recall the story of Blizzard having to divert the truck filled with employee versions of the collector’s edition to the retail channel because the game was selling out.ĭay one of The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King both saw midnight launch parties at retailers. With the original World of Warcraft launch, that was all boxes purchased retail.
After Cataclysm Blizzard needed to give M ists of Pandaria a bit more runway to get into the zone I guess.Īnd, of course, we get into what really counts as day one sales. Those are mostly “first 24 hours” of sales, except where noted. Mists of Pandaria – 2.7 million (first week).The totals, so far as I could figure it out some time back, should now look like this: Battle for Azeroth had one two years back which pegged its first day sales at 3.4 million, and Legion had one before that which put it at 3.3 million, and so on down the line. Still, it is good to see the game doing well, though for the video game industry the pandemic has been a rising tide that has lifted all boats it seems.Īnyway, like I said, there is a press release like this every expansion. The game’s peak no doubt remains in the Wrath of the Lich King era.Ī chart from 2015 back when we used to get subscriber numbers The first point is time bound by expansions that launched in the last decade, which basically means since they pissed a lot of people off with the Cataclysm expansion. The last bullet point is a solid one, since numbers were up a year ago due to WoW Classic, so topping that says something. In addition, total player time in game this year to date has nearly doubled compared to the same period last year.Players have spent more time in Azeroth year to date than in the same period of any of the last 10 years.In the months leading up to the expansion’s release and the time since launch, the game reached and has sustained its highest number of players on monthly or longer-term subscriptions compared to the same period ahead of and following any WoW expansion in the past decade, in both the West and the East.That is some boast, though the previous champion was, by their accounting, was Diablo III which had 3.5 million first day sales.
This time though Blizzard has out done itself with a press release declaring Shadowlands “the fastest-selling PC game of all time industry-wide” having had 3.7 million first day sales.
This has become a staple post after every WoW expansion release, usually because Blizzard puts out a press release about the first day sales full of superlatives.