Records are meant to be broken
Between work and the PhD grind, I’ve been rampaging through Northrend, taking in all the sites and sounds of the new Warcraft expansion. I was catching up with RSS feeds today when I read about Blizzard’s sales figures for Wrath of the Lich King over the first 24-hours.
That figure? 2.8 MILLION copies…
…in 24 hours.
I’ve been presenting a lot on Warcraft lately for a few grad classes at PSU, and I try to put some of these numbers into perspective (which is hard to do).
WoW subscribers have surpassed the 11 million mark. If Azeroth were a country, this would place it ~75th largest in the world, between Greece and Chad.
11 million people pay AT LEAST $12 a month to play the game, some paying as much as $15. $12.00 x 11M = $132 million dollars A MONTH for Blizzard.
The Burning crusade, the first WoW expansion, sold 2.4 million copies in the first 24-hours, which set a record. Wrath just broke this record by an additional 400,000 copies.
The Burning crusade also set the record for most copies of a game sold in a single month, 3.5M, and Wrath will likely break that.
The expansion costs $40.00. $40.00 x 2.8M = $112M for blizzard in ONE DAY.
I realize all this money does not go directly to Blizzard, other organizations are in the loop such as publishers…but still, these numbers are hard to grasp.
When calculating these statistics, you have to keep in mind the reason Blizzard has a monthly fee to play the game. There are a lot of servers that need to be maintained and updated. They have people patching exploits and problems, etc. They pay GMs to be on call. When calculating all these costs, I’m sure the $132 million is a lot less. But yeah, they definitely make a lot of money every month on this game.
Yeah. It’s pretty outrageous.