This figure from NPD includes every SKU released at retail in the US, which is probably their second biggest market after China.
This is hard numbers on retail sales, not subscribers. The number of sales will be higher than subscribers due to churn
Personally, that's not as many as I expected. Lets do some napkin calculations.
As of January 2008, we know from NPD that Burning Crusade sold 2.25m. Most indications are that Lich King outperformed it. Lets say today, that's maybe a healthy 3m or so. That's over a third of our definitive 8.6m figure so not un-generous.
Also in 2008, Blizzard estimated North America to be around 25% of subscribers, it would be reasonable to estimate the US market alone therefore represents approx 20% based on traditional NPD / NPD Canada data we have.
Some estimates have put China as representing as much as 50% of subscribers. Again, erring on the side of caution and making the calculation easy, lets dial that back to 40%.
This is all very rough and subject to a wide error margin of course, but just by way of example. You could then posit that Lich King has sold around 9m copies LTD to 60% of WoW userbase.
Lets pretend the present uncertainty over the Lich King in China gets sorted out tomorrow and every subscriber buys it straight away (i.e. they don't get it for free like Burning Crusade or that still counts as a "sale"). Now we're up to 15m LTD.
So even with these rather generous assumptions the WoW subscriber base would need to grow 33% world wide on these figures to challenge the 20m GLS.
As I've argued on here previously, I would venture there are several other mitigating factors that should dampen expectations on this rather rosy outlook.
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This is hard numbers on retail sales, not subscribers. The number of sales will be higher than subscribers due to churn
Personally, that's not as many as I expected. Lets do some napkin calculations.
As of January 2008, we know from NPD that Burning Crusade sold 2.25m. Most indications are that Lich King outperformed it. Lets say today, that's maybe a healthy 3m or so. That's over a third of our definitive 8.6m figure so not un-generous.
Also in 2008, Blizzard estimated North America to be around 25% of subscribers, it would be reasonable to estimate the US market alone therefore represents approx 20% based on traditional NPD / NPD Canada data we have.
Some estimates have put China as representing as much as 50% of subscribers. Again, erring on the side of caution and making the calculation easy, lets dial that back to 40%.
This is all very rough and subject to a wide error margin of course, but just by way of example. You could then posit that Lich King has sold around 9m copies LTD to 60% of WoW userbase.
Lets pretend the present uncertainty over the Lich King in China gets sorted out tomorrow and every subscriber buys it straight away (i.e. they don't get it for free like Burning Crusade or that still counts as a "sale"). Now we're up to 15m LTD.
So even with these rather generous assumptions the WoW subscriber base would need to grow 33% world wide on these figures to challenge the 20m GLS.
As I've argued on here previously, I would venture there are several other mitigating factors that should dampen expectations on this rather rosy outlook.