World of Warcraft expansion has topped all previous sales records in its first 24 hours

More than 3.3 million copies of "World of Warcraft: Cataclysm" were sold in the first 24 hours of its Dec. 7 release, easily surpassing the previous record holder "World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King," the predecessor to the latest game. Blizzard released the latter game in November 2008.

"Cataclysm" marks back-to-back hits for Blizzard. The company launched in November the video game "Call of Duty: Black Ops" and sold 5.6 million copies in the first 24 hours, which amounted to $360 million in sales. "Call of Duty" is for video-game consoles, such as Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, as well as for PCs and Macs. "Cataclysm" is only available on computers.

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The latter game was released Dec. 7 in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Europe, Russia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. More than 10,000 stores opened at midnight and more than 15,000 players attended launch events in the countries, Blizzard says. "World of Warcraft" has more than 12 million subscribers globally.

With "Cataclysm," Blizzard has changed the look of the game and the way it is played, as the result of an Azeroth-destroying dragon called DeathWing. Azeroth is the name of the world that's the game's stage. "We had to bring Azeroth to the brink of destruction in 'Cataclysm,' but the result was our best expansion yet," Mike Morhaime, chief executive and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, said in a statement released Monday. Blizzard Entertainment is the Activision Blizzard subsidiary that released "Cataclysm," as well as "Black Ops."

Besides setting a first-day sales record, "Black Ops" set a five-day record of $650 million in gross sales worldwide. The game easily beat the previous record holder "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2," which took in $550 million. "Modern Warfare 2" was the previous record holder of day-one video game sales.

After a year of mostly lagging sales, the video-game industry has been on a roll in the last quarter with the release of motion-sensing add-on devices for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The Kinect and Move, respectively, have been major sales drivers for the industry, along with the release of "Black Ops." While the industry was once headed for a year-to-year decline in sales, it is now expected to end 2010 with store sales of between $18.8 billion and $19.6 billion, The NPD Group says. The higher end of the range would essentially be flat to last year.

The latest World of Warcraft expansion has topped all previous sales records in its first 24 hours, not just for WoW but for all PC game titles.

Dubbed World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the game’s final count for copies sold is — are you sitting down? — 3.3 million in the expansion’s first day. That means more than one out of four WoW subscribers bought the expansion within 24 hours of its release.

Based on data from its distributors, WoW maker Blizzard Entertainment is calling Cataclysm “the fastest-selling PC game of all time.”

By (an admittedly apples-to-oranges but nonetheless interesting) comparison, the iPhone 4 saw a paltry 1.5 million units moved in its first 24 hours; and only 2 million songs by the Beatles were sold during the entire week of that band’s iTunes premiere.

The expansion has been getting buzz for months already for its radical alterations to existing WoW content and for bringing new regions, quests, races, learnable skills and battlegrounds to the game. Cataclysm also brought some significant social-gaming improvements by beefing up features for guilds.

And when Blizzard put the expansion’s cinematic trailer on YouTube (), that quickly went viral, too, garnering more than 1 million views in its first day online.

Given all the pre-launch excitement over the expansion — and previous WoW expansion sales figures, which would typically break 2 million — we’re not completely shocked that Cataclysm is performing so well.

If you’ve bought and played the expansion already, please let us know what you think in the comments. http://jugar-online.blogspot.com/