Less than one month. That’s how long it took for the video-game industry to see yet another blockbuster title.
In November, Call of Duty: Black Ops shattered theatrical box office, book and video-game sales records for a five-day worldwide sell-through of more than $650 million. Now World of Warcraft: Cataclysm looks like it might repeat the performance.
Massive Multiplayer Success
Blizzard Entertainment, maker of the popular World of Warcraft series, announced that Cataclysm — the third in the series of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game — sold more than 3.3 million copies during its first 24 hours on the market.
That qualifies Cataclysm as the fastest-selling PC game of all time. The previous record was 2.8 million-plus copies sold in 24 hours in November 2008. That was also a Blizzard title — and also a World of Warcraft title: Wrath of the Lich King.
“We had to bring Azeroth to the brink of destruction in Cataclysm, but the result was our best expansion yet,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard. Before the launch of Cataclysm, World of Warcraft’s subscriber population had grown to more than 12 million players globally.
Gaming for Everyone
Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, is seeing a strong season for video games across the board this holiday shopping season. He pointed to titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, as well as Microsoft’s success selling its Kinect peripheral for Xbox and new Xbox 360s. But he also noted the growing popularity of nontraditional games.
“Angry Birds racked up five million paid downloads with $1 million a month worth of advertising revenue, according to reports. So it’s not just traditional game platforms, but also these new mobile gaming platforms that really didn’t exist a few years ago, that show consumers are still very much interested in…