WoW: The Burning Crusade Is Fastest-Selling PC Game Ever

Over 2 million fans were prepared for the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion, from the very first day it was released one week ago. After checking their internal company records and consulting with their key distribution partners, Blizzard announced today that The Burning Crusade has broken the day-one sales record to become the fastest-selling PC game ever in North America and Europe, with a worldwide total of nearly 2.4 million copies sold in the first 24 hours of availability.

The day-one buyers were split evenly between Europe and North America, as each of these territories had around 1.1 million and 1.2 million copies, respectively, sold within the first 24 hours of launch. But aside from these, the first World of Warcraft expansion also debuted in Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia on 16 January, and numbers from these territories could drive the final count even higher. Not to mention that Australia and New Zealand joined the party one day later.

In the UK, The Burning Crusade blinked straight to the top of the game-charts last week, and as Gamasutra reports, "it narrowly missed out (by under one thousand units) on beating the record for the fastest ever selling PC title in the UK, currently held by Eidos' Championship Manager 04". Also, it seems that "the expansion outsold the original World of WarCraft's launch week by a factor of almost 4 to 1, a unique feat for any expansion", Gamasutra added.

From the 2.4 million packs that were initially sold in the US & EU, Blizzard says that over 1.7 million players had already upgraded their WoW account and logged in to play The Burning Crusade, by the end of the first day of availability.

However, despite the fact that Blizzard supplied more than 4 million game boxes to retailers worldwide, many of them were sold out pretty fast, and even now the demand continues to dwarf availability in many countries (here in Romania, for instance, we're only getting a meagre 500 extra copies this week, whoopty-doo...). So if you're still looking to buy yours, well, what ca I say. Look harder! And next time pre-order.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)