http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/12/13/wows-cataclysm-demolishes-lich-king-sales-record/

The above link is dated the 13 th december 2010 . It tells of the impressive ( thats an understatment really ) sales figures for the launch of Cataclysm on 7 the December 2010 . This is 6 days after its release and includes digital sales as well as boxed sales .

Thus far it is 9 days since the release of MoP so logically Blizzard should have the release day sales and as of yet these have not been released to the press .

I'm starting to wonder when and if Blizzard will release them .

edit ( i m sure someone will pull me over of my spelling of announce I did realise I forgot to put the extra N in but posted accidently before I could put it right )

You'll get the information when Blizzard can frame it in a positive light.

So if they didn't sell as many copies by opening day as Cata did, don't expect them to annouce it.

When/if sales catch up to and exceed Cata's sales numbers that's when they'll make an annoucement and it will seem like a great triumph, perhaps masking the fact people were slower to purchase than the last time around.

If they never catch up, they'll hold off as long as possible, and try to keep it under the radar.

Originally posted by nyxium
There are massive queues to get in realms at the moment. That does not mean large sales of MoP however, players could just want to login and roll a free panda without the expansion, or just log in to chew the fat.. after going to the offiical forums I get a preliminary hunch that the panda's are not going down too well, and have put people off the game. So far.

The last I  looked at the english speaking EU servers there were 4-5 locked out of 10-15 high/full load severs . It was only in these 4-5 locked ones there were massive ques .I couldn't get into outland because there was que of 500 + . I had no problem getting onto the other high servers . There were also a huge number of low population servers compared to Cata . I remember even deathwing managed to get upto medium when that was released .

I think your post is slighly misleading because the huge ques are very limited ( in the EU at least ) .

http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=6147208

2,7 mln copies in first week.   Subs rise to 10 mln. 

Now important will be figures 1  and 3 months from now on.

Originally posted by fenistil

http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=6147208

2,7 mln copies in first week.   Subs rise to 10 mln. 

Now important will be figures 1  and 3 months from now on.

 MOP undersold LK - WOTLK had 2.8m in the first 24 hours

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/11/20/wows-lich-king-sells-record-2-8-million-copies-in-24-hours/

Originally posted by Nadia

Originally posted by fenistil

http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=6147208

2,7 mln copies in first week.   Subs rise to 10 mln. 

Now important will be figures 1  and 3 months from now on.

 MOP undersold LK - WOTLK had 2.8m in the first 24 hours

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/11/20/wows-lich-king-sells-record-2-8-million-copies-in-24-hours/

 

When WOTLK came out WoW was still going full steam ahead though, it's in a much different place now to then. I only played about 2 total months of the 22 or so Cataclysm was even availavble, bought it day 1, played a month, went back for another month to kill deathwing and ditched the game again. I have just today bought MoP I expect others ( many in my guild ) are in a similar scenario, Cataclysm was pretty bad and the large decline in sub numbers reflect that.

Originally posted by Nadia

Originally posted by fenistil

http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=6147208

2,7 mln copies in first week.   Subs rise to 10 mln. 

Now important will be figures 1  and 3 months from now on.

 MOP undersold LK - WOTLK had 2.8m in the first 24 hours

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/11/20/wows-lich-king-sells-record-2-8-million-copies-in-24-hours/

 

And what is the point there?

The game is very old and there is more competition than ever. I hate WoW, but I don't think anyone should have expected this to be their highest or even second highest selling expansion ever.

If I ran a game company I would be thrilled to sell 2.7 million copies in a week and have 10 million subscribers.

i was giving contextual information

Blizzard is the best selling mmo but MOP seems to be the weakest selling expansion for Blizzard in the last 4 years

http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=6147208

It looks like they did give the figure today . It was eventually in line with what I expected .I'd forcasted around 2.5 million in the first week .

It also shows why Blizzard didn't offer release day figures because they were most likly comparitivlydisapointing compared to Cataclysm .

A weeks sales do put it in a better light . I suspect release day sales were about 1.5 - 2 million which would have looked pretty bad .

Who really cares which game sells how many?  I mean, I couldn't care less about numbers sold.  Play the game, if you like it, play it more.  If you don't, go troll somewhere else lol.  If I see another "this game sold this many" or "this game has this many players" threads, I'm going to scream my head off.  Why does it even matter?  

I can tell you that I have characters spread across 3 servers, ALL 3 of them have had a queue since launch at one time or another.  One of them has a queue everyday starting at about 3-4pm CST and ending around 11pm CST.  None of these servers used to have a queue, and hasn't had a queue since Burning Crusade.

What's really funny is that any developer would love to sell a million copies, let alone 2+...sold more than any other game has players still lol...if that's bad, then I guess I'm wrong.

Edit: Forgot to mention that some of the best times I've ever had in any MMO was in small games that probably only had maybe 400-500 players...It's a game, it's about fun, not numbers.

Originally posted by nyxium
There are massive queues to get in realms at the moment. That does not mean large sales of MoP however, players could just want to login and roll a free panda without the expansion, or just log in to chew the fat.. after going to the offiical forums I get a preliminary hunch that the panda's are not going down too well, and have put people off the game. So far.

It's also likely due in part to their CRZ system being full of bugs and not working right.

Here's the issue.

A bunch of people coming back for the expansion logging their level capped toons to enjoy the new cap. So the high level areas are full with more people then usual. And of course, any high level zone with not quite enough people in it ( by CRZ's calculations ) gets filled with more from other servers.

Then you have new players starting with MoP. So now you have newbies in lower xones plus people from other servers being shoved in there to fill out the zones ( again, by CRZ's calculations ).

The problem?

CRZ is designed to take zone levels into consideration when shoving players from other realms into your realm. However, CRZ does not seem to take into consideration the servers cap.

So on servers that are already high pop servers, CRZ shoves more in and *bam* instant qeue.

People got burned with Cata, they are waiting to see if MoP will be the right path.

Things to remember since people wanna draw comparisons.

When Wotlk was release the economy was chugging along, people could justify a box+sub cost for entertainment. Cata released when people were always sure that blizzard could deliver them the best entertainment for their buck, it atleast for me didn't. MoP releases after a terrible expansion and in a still very shaky economy.

Alot of players because of financial reasons are dispersing to B2P/F2P options. Right now GW2, D3 and TL2 are good recent options this year. There are quite a few other games coming out and a few that have been out for awhile now.

So blizzard will probably wait to release numbers in a favorable light or just release them with its normal reports. They'll wait as long as they need to get another burst of sales for people who are waiting to see a large number of sold copies.

Either way i'm glad I got MoP, far exceeds Cata and alot of fun.

Originally posted by Gravarg

some of the best times I've ever had in any MMO was in small games that probably only had maybe 400-500 players...It's a game, it's about fun, not numbers.

i agree that numbers dont matter for personal fun

but numbers still get tossed around as source of measurement like everything else under the sun

taking about numbers is no worse than talking about politics ;)

Originally posted by Nadia

i was giving contextual information

Blizzard is the best selling mmo but MOP seems to be the weakest selling expansion for Blizzard in the last 4 years

Because 2.7 million isn't a lot...

All you people just wetting yourselves for this game to die, especially posts from people thathate the game or have not played since Vanilla, who cares? Post after post of the same bullshit. People complain about the treadmill in WoW, don't any of you get tired of seeing the same threads over and over again?

Now all of you count to 2.7 million, make a post when your done.

Originally posted by Aori

People got burned with Cata, they are waiting to see if MoP will be the right path.

  MoP releases after a terrible expansion and in a still very shaky economy.

Alot of players because of financial reasons are dispersing to B2P/F2P options. Right now GW2, D3 and TL2 are good recent options this year. There are quite a few other games coming out and a few that have been out for awhile now.

its a reasonable explanation -- especially w D3 selling 10 million 3 months ago

everything ive heard about MOP is that its a good expansion despite weaker sales

A damn near decade old mmorpg sells 2.7 million copies in ONE week before they release in China and this crowd is harking on it selling less that the last expansion? After so long do you really expect the game to continue to out perform itself? While at the same time it's STILL out performing the competition. Let's not debate that little nugget, but do yourself a favor and try to think of ANY mmorpg expansion released  that has outperformed it's previous expansion or matched it. You won't find those numbers and you know why? Because no other mmo developer EVER releases those numbers! And no one in the industry cares about them either.

I even tried to look up GW numbers for how the original sold as oppose to the expansions and no one is bothering to seperate the numbers. They are all lumped together as one big number at 6.5 million. And if you divide that number by the number of expansions then you get roughly 1.6 million per release. Now compare that to WoW's numbers at 4.7 million per release with the exception to the last expansion at 2.7 million. And if you lump together Blizzard's game + expansions like GW's, you get a whopping 21.5 million copies of WoW roughly sold.

I repeat, that is not bad for such an old game. To steadily out perform EVERY competitor since it's last exansion release 2 years ago says a lot about the impact it still has on the industry. That list includes: TSW, GW2, SWTOR and a slew of F2P and expansions for all of those games.

And this is coming from a guy that currently enjoying the sh*t out of GW2 and looking foward to enjoying DF: UW, AoW and AA.

Originally posted by Ramonski7

A damn near decade old mmorpg sells 2.7 million copies in ONE week before they release in China and this crowd is harking on it selling less that the last expansion? After so long do you really expect the game to continue to out perform itself? While at the same time it's STILL out performing the competition. Let's not debate that little nugget, but do yourself a favor and try to think of ANY mmorpg expansion released  that has outperformed it's previous expansion or matched it. You won't find those numbers and you know why? Because no other mmo developer EVER releases those numbers! And no one in the industry cares about them either.

 

I even tried to look up GW numbers for how the original sold as oppose to the expansions and no one is bothering to seperate the numbers. They are all lumped together as one big number at 6.5 million. And if you divide that number by the number of expansions then you get roughly 1.6 million per release. Now compare that to WoW's numbers at 4.7 million per release with the exception to the last expansion at 2.7 million. And if you lump together Blizzard's game + expansions like GW's, you get a whopping 21.5 million copies of WoW roughly sold.

 

I repeat, that is not bad for such an old game. To steadily out perform EVERY competitor since it's last exansion release 2 years ago says a lot about the impact it still has on the industry. That list includes: TSW, GW2, SWTOR and a slew of F2P and expansions for all of those games.

 

And this is coming from a guy that currently enjoying the sh*t out of GW2 and looking foward to enjoying DF: UW, AoW and AA.

I don't think anybody stated their sales were bad. I believe anyone to a man would admit it's still very impressive especially due to the age of the game.

The sales number comes up because it is also well known, as Blizz has reported themselves, that they are/were bleeding subs.

Now bleeding to Blizz is an entirely different thing than bleeding to other companies but on a percentage basis it has been very significant. Lost revenue is lost revenue.

This was the x-pac that they wanted to bring players back. Rekindling the horde vs alliance fued.

The sales number is the first barometer to see if Blizz has suceeded in their goal. I would say at the 1 week mark probably not. Sales are down from previous x-pacs. Again, that doesn't mean they are awful, just down.

Alot of people will buy, sub, play for a while then cancel again.

The 6 month mark will be very interesting for Blizz and the direction of WoW.