Posts with tag sales

We've heard before about World of Warcraft strutting up the PC gaming market before, but could this game also be holding up the PC game accessories market? Seems that way for Steelseries -- they're the makers of the WoW mouse that we've mentioned (the one that might not be quite kosher with Blizzard's Terms of Service, use with caution). They've just recently inked a deal with Best Buy to carry some of their products (including the WoW mouse), and World of Warcraft played so much of a part in the deal that CEO Bruce Hawver credited Blizzard's MMO with creating his "high-quality gamers": "The way I used to pick up the phone after school, now, kids log into World of Warcraft and chat... Online gaming might cost $14 to $18 a month – less than a single movie visit for two people."

It does follow -- if WoW is one of the only reasons left for people to spend money on PC games, it does seem that it would be one of the only reasons for them to spend money on gaming accessories. High-end mice and keyboards use to be the domain of the FPS player -- guys like Fata1ity pimped their own lines and all the mice bragged about their resolution and ease of use. But the PC market has changed, and MMOs are the game of the day now -- everything is about squeezing function into as many buttons as possible and reaching this 11 million player group roaming around Azeroth. If Steelseries and other accessory manufacturers want to sell their products, they've got to try and sell them to us.

Our good friend Tateru Nino (who is in fact an Aussie herself) has a followup over at Massively about the report that World of Warcraft was no longer legally available in Oz earlier this week. The issue isn't in the rules -- those are the same: unclassified games like World of Warcraft are held to the same rules as banned games -- but in the lack of enforcement. Since the issue has gone public, stores are continuing to sell the game (though some have removed larger sale displays of the games), and law enforcement has made no moves to try and get the games off of store shelves.

The real problem here, of course, isn't that Australia wants to ban these games, but that they're falling through the cracks of what seems to be an extremely lax rating system. There's really no rating assigned to these games, so according to the rules, they can't be sold. But the rules make no sense in this case: no one, as far as we've heard, actually wants to ban these games in the country, and no one cares whether they're being sold on store shelves or not.

Still, Massively does expect action, eventually, even if it's an apparently much-needed rejiggering of the ratings system to include these "unrated" games. Bottom line right now is that if you want to buy or sell World of Warcraft in Australia, no one's stopping you from doing so.

Surprised? You probably shouldn't be -- NPD has released the top sales list for November, and our favorite game is sitting right on top. In fact, the most interesting thing about the list is what's not on it: games. Wrath is at number one, followed up by such great titles like Office 2007 and Trend Micro Anti-virus. The collector's edition of Wrath comes in at number four, and after that it's all utilities except Call of Duty: World at War at number six and Spore at number 10.

That's a sad month for PC gaming, especially during a time when sales are supposed to be at their highest. Blizzard's leading the charge (and they're not leaving PC anytime soon), but they seem to be pretty much the only PC studio able to bring it home this year.

Videogame sales in general are doing just great: even in a bad economy, console companies -- both developers and retailers -- are seeing nice growth. But those saying PC gaming is dead will only have to point to November's sales for proof. Maybe in 2009 we can get a couple more titles quality enough to give World of Warcraft a run for its money.

Our friend The WoW Economist started a little project the other day: he added up, according to the top items lists, all of the products sold from Northrend across the servers, and then multiplied each by what he calls a "median" price (though exactly how that's reached, we're not sure), and landed on a huge amount of gold: 719,918,239.7. Obviously I'm not a WoW Economist (I'm not even that good at math), but that sounds to me like Northrend's gross domestic product: players are creating an economy of 719 million gold in Northrend from week to week.

Unfortunately, that number alone doesn't tell us much, except that there's a lot of gold moving around in Northrend (it would be interesting to compare this to, say, Azeroth or Outland's equivalent, though the more useful numbers would probably be Outland before the new expansion hit, when everyone was still farming and selling items from there). And it will be interesting to see this tracked in the future: the real GDP is usually used as an indicator of both standard of living and a country's economic health, and while there are drawbacks to using that number to gauge both of those qualities, it's probably fair to say the economy in Northrend is booming. Maybe tracking this in the future will let us see how new content patches or item or even class updates can affect what the economy does there.

Very interesting. EVE Online's creators, CCP, have actually hired an economist to help run their ingame economy, and while WoW's isn't generally seen as quite that complicated, there are still plenty of big numbers to play around with..

We knew it was going to be a lot, but I think the game outsold even our expectations: Blizzard has announced that the game's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, sold 2.8 million copies worldwide in the first 24 hours, and undoubtedly many more in the weekend after that (we're expecting an announcement later this month around five million in the first 30 days). That makes the game the fastest selling PC game of all time, and by far the fastest-selling expansion of all time (remember that this isn't even a complete game that's flying off the shelves). The previous record, of course, was set by the Burning Crusade, which sold 2.4 million copies during launch.

Pretty huge, but when you consider that the game has 11 million subscribers around the world, those numbers are just about right. Looks like Morhaime is on to something -- as long as they have players ready to buy the game in numbers like this, Blizzard will undoubtedly release expansions as long as they can.

Thanks, Doug!

Unfortunately, as of this writing, Blizzard hasn't yet released actual numbers for Wrath sales last week (we were expecting around two million, but we'll see what they say eventually). But that won't stop us from guessing -- the list of top ten games sold last week in the UK is out, and Wrath... is number two.

That's right -- Activision's own Call of Duty: World at War beat out Wrath for the number one spot, but before you start worrying whether WoW has lost its charm, don't: not only was Wrath an expansion pack (expansion packs obviously don't sell as well as standalone games, sequels or otherwise), but the Call of Duty game has already outsold its prequel, the extremely successful Call of Duty 4, by a 2:1 ratio. Unfortunately, we don't have numbers yet, but all indications are that, in the UK alone, Wrath did almost as well as a game that outsold last year's best selling game. That all make sense?

If not, hear this: Blizzard made a lot of money last week, and pretty soon we'll hear how much. Even more amazing, Activision Blizzard, who owns Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft, accounted for a full 25% of all UK game sales last week. The merger has already paid off.

Whoever writes the descriptions for Gamestop and EB Games is quite the joker -- we already reported on their hidden little note for the early preview, but now that we're getting closer and closer to the Wrath of the Lich King release, they've posted another funny on the preview page.

This time, they're making fun of the starting zones -- apparently the "Borean Tundra" is where the Packers play (chuckle), and a "Howling Fjord" is what you get when the windows of your Tauren Taurus are cracked open (guffaw). Cute. Just don't quit that day job of writing descriptions for Gamestop's sales pages.

Thanks, djtyrant!

Here's our first analysis of Wrath sales (actually second, if you count Mike Morhaime's take on the subject): someone thinks it's going to sell big. Gamasutra reports that Mike Hickey of Janco Partners is predicting sales of five million copies for Wrath's first month in stores, which would basically make it the most popular expansion pack of all time. Burning Crusade, a pack that just barely beat out The Sims, sold 2.4 million copies in the first 24 hours, and 3.5 million within the first month, and so Hickey is looking at a little less than double that for the Northrend expansion.

Huge numbers indeed, and yet they don't seem that surprising -- WoW's population has grown since Burning Crusade was released for sure, and while pretty much everyone agrees that not all players will be buying the expansion right away (our own informal poll has about 13% of our readers waiting, not to mention all of the players in other markets around the world), but if even 1/4 of WoW's 11 million players decide to pick up the game on launch, we're still looking at 2.75 million copies, more than BC.

No matter what, Blizzard will make a lot of money, and very likely break all records anyway next week. Wrath of the Lich King will be huge.

[via BigDownload]

Reader Dave sent word of another bug in the game after the latest patch (thanks!) that might cost players some money. A player was trying to sell his Hyacinth pet on the Auction House (there's a small craze on vanity pets right now, thanks to the achievements) when he ran into a problem -- an error told him that you couldn't AH "an item with used charges." Except that he hadn't used the pet yet -- it wasn't in his pets screen. But Blues have confirmed that with pets purchased or obtained but not used before the patch, this can happen -- the pet will be unsellable.

Darkmoon Faire cards are apparently having the same issue, but as you might expect, it's unlikely that Blizzard will take steps to fix this, both because all we're talking about here is AH selling (not a critical game mechanic), and because this problem doesn't seem to be affecting new pets and cards, only cards that were purchased and owned before the patch. But maybe they will hotfix it, we'll just have to wait and see.

Anyone that horded pets to sell on the AH could be in trouble, though -- if you've got a significant amount of gold stored up in pets you were intending to sell, you might be out ot luck.

Gamestop employees got a memo yesterday that preorders of the Wrath of the Lich King Collector's Edition may have reached their limit, and we've just called and confirmed that -- the Collector's Edition is sold out already at Gamestop. Looks like Amazon also has also taken down their preorders, instead offering a signup to be notified "when this item becomes available." The thing has only been on sale for two days, and already it seems many retails have run out of their listed units -- in fact, Gamestop told their employees that they may not even have been able to fulfill all the orders taken so far.

Of course, we're still talking preorders here -- just because they got reserved doesn't mean that they'll all be sold, so there's still a chance that you could get one at release (Gamestop, we believe, will hold reserves for 24-48 hours after release, and then sell them first-come, first-serve). And there's a chance that Blizzard could put a larger order in (since the game hasn't gone gold yet, the sets aren't even manufactured yet), which would mean more preorders would be available.

But on the other hand, Blizzard has always wanted the Collector's Editions to be limited, and the guys at Gamestop assured us that there were still plenty of regular copies to reserve. It's hard to believe the CE could be completely sold out in just two days, two months ahead of the actual release, but it's clear that Wrath is going to be one of Blizzard's biggest releases ever.

Update: And now, for some reason, it looks like preorders are back up. Either Blizzard decided to make more or Gamestop figured out how they could sell more, so if you want to get one, better order it quick.

Our sister site Big Download, purveyor of all things PC games, have released their list of the most anticipated PC titles for the rest of the year, and as you might imagine, Wrath of the Lich King is posted in there, nestled in among other sure-to-be-giants like Spore and Left 4 Dead. The game that's expected to be WoW's big MMO competition this fall, Warhammer Online, is in there as well, so for those of you who are PC gamers, the Fall and Winter future looks particularly bright (even if it does seem a little slow lately).

Of course, we have no idea how WoW's second expansion will fare on retail shelves this Fall, but all of the ingredients are there -- WoW is experiencing a resurgence lately (thanks in part to Blizzard's Recuit-a-friend promotion), and the news out of the beta has been nothing but encouraging for most everybody. Burning Crusade was gigantic, and that was back when 8 million were playing the game. All indications are that Blizzard stands to rake in the cash when their expansion goes on sale later this year.

Normally, we don't concern ourselves with sales charts too much -- we really only cover the one game, so comparing it to others really isn't our thing. Unless it's the only game in town, which, according to this month's NPD PC game software sales charts, posted by WorldofWar.net, it pretty much is. Out of the top ten PC games, Blizzard is responsible for a full half, and of those five, four are World of Warcraft related.

1. WoW: Battle Chest
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
3. World Of Warcraft
4. Nancy Drew: The Phantom Of Venice
5. Spore Creature Creator
6. Diablo Battle Chest
7. Warcraft III Battle Chest
8. WoW: Burning Crusade
9. The Sims 2 Ikea Home Stuff
10. Call of Duty 4

Just wild. Diablo's Battle Chest is undoubtedly there because of the Diablo III announcement, but the rest is all World of Warcraft -- people are picking up the game, its expansion, the Battle Chest (which combines both), and even the predecessor Warcraft III (in which the Wrath backstory features prominently) in droves.

PC gaming isn't dead at all. But there's no question that of the struts keeping it standing, Blizzard is definitely one of the strongest.