World of Warcraft Sells 8.6 Million Units in US

258 mil in retail, with 210 million (give or take) coming in every month. so they all drive in rocket cars and live in platinum houses right?

Blizzard has mastered the endgame experience, or at least they are the best to ever manage an endgame experience. That is probably more important for purposes of retention than initial sales, but WoW's status as the big boy of MMO's probably leads to better sales because players are confident that the game will be around for the foreseeable future.

They really are brilliant. Want to PvP? Fine, here are a dozen ways to do it, from Arena to BG's to Wintergrasp. Want to be a raider? Here's a ton of different ways to make the same dungeon interesting for months on end, from Hard Mode to Heroics to Achievements. Want to sit with your level 80 in Dalaran and play My Little Pony? Well, let's put it this way... There's an achievement for getting 50 or 100 different mounts. Feel like just screwing around with harmless quests? Fishing, cooking, engineering, blacksmithing, etc etc etc.

The game starts at 80.

I'm sorry, but that isn't very impressive.

News flash.

That shit is printing money. Haha, cha-ching!

*evil laugh*

That actually doesn't seem like much at all. I assumed it would be much higher given the game's apparent popularity. Didn't games like Gears of War and CoD4 on 360 sell nearly as much or some such thing (and those don't appear to be anywhere near as popular as WoW)?

hmmm. that would lead to a much lower "WoW headcount" than I thought was in the US.

PC GAMING IS DEAD

This is kind of hilarious compared to the "SC2 will sell 4 million copies in a few months" analyst prediction further up the page.

And by hilarious, I mean indicative of analysts in this industry being awful at predictions.

really it all boils down to a mix between updating classes adding content and fixing bugs. blizzard micromanages their content to a crazy degree. they elarned this the first year by paying attention to their players habits. Sure they know they cant release content fast enough. But the thing is people know blizzard will add more to the game. people know blizzard will...do this...and that. So their retention rate is higher then most mmos and their chrun rate is higher then most mmos. And they tend to cater to both audiances pvp and pve. Where as most mmo developers cater to one audiance alone and kinda toss the other one in there.

Sony and ea/mythic really could learn alot from blizzard if they would stop trying to copy their game mechanics and start to copy their design philosophy with regards to retention and churn.

Most mmo players want somthing new but they dont trust other developers to support their products as good as bliz does.

Its dumb that they published the retail numbers. You don't need to buy it off the shelf to play WoW since you can just DL the demo and later purchase a license code on-line. Or just borrow the installation disk from a friend and purchase a license code on-line.
In fact this is encouraged by Blizzard since the game software itself is immaterial without a legitimate payed license.

They should show us the number of active paid accounts.
If they really want to show off an impressive number then they could show the total number of accounts created weather they are active or not.

Amazing. The staying power of this juggernaut simply amazes me. It just keeps on rolling. Any dev would be tickled to reach platinum but then there's all the subscription gravy on top. Amazing.

Why even bother publishing Gamasutras numbers, anyone could have done the math on "$30 average price per game" When are they getting something I can't do in 4 seconds like numbers of sales from the online store or subscriptions + cafes in china and korea?

iirc the game can also be purchased online through their free trial

And that is just from the retail sales.

/yawn

Let me know when they break 7 bajillion-zillion-quadillion-million-buttsex. Until then this is just another pedestrian figure not worth my time.

If I ask them nice enough, they'll give me 10 thousand from that sum.