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.
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