From Kotaku: "[...]Blizzard might be giving that to them in the form of in-game achievements in the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. According to DeathKnight.info, players in the Wrath of the Lich King alpha can type /achievement to bring up a screen like the one above, which shows various achievements that can be performed for points, which will more than likely then go towards buying gear and such."
It appears there is still buying interest in Lich King at 10 million copies even though we have BC forecasted at just 10 million copies. This is a good short opportunity if people continue to buy at these levels.
Somehow Wrath of the Lich King was forecasting much more than Burning Crusade, even though the latter is a pre-requisite of the former. Wrath of the Lich King can't sell more than Burning Crusade, it is a second expansion that builds on it.
J. Allen Brack: That's actually something we talk about every expansion. It's interesting, two games have really tried that before, Ultima Online tried it and EverQuest tried it as well, and in each case it was only somewhat successful.
I've been out of the WoW "loop" for awhile but I'm pretty sure it has, or had, 10 million subscribers. If the numbers of people that resubscribe for this game are anything like for the Burning Crusade it won't be a huge stretch of the imagination for it to sell 11 million.
That being said, I don't think this one's gonna pull nearly as many toons out of retirement as BC did.
@Jamix012, Well, it is possible to have an expansion sell more than the original. You can have new users, for instance.
On a side note, are we including digital distribution to the numbers that we have? If not, then there's another possible reason; WoW players who didn't buy the game retail who bought retail copies.
A more appropriate comparison would have been the first expansion numbers, which we are currently predicting to sell/have sold 10.79M.
VGChartz's accuracy issues aside, I would have to agree with you that an expansion selling more than a million over its base game is a bit screwy.
Why are PC games so overly priced? Sims 3 is ridculous and this is nearly as bad: According to VGchartz the original WOW has sold 9.19 million. According to this website an expansion pack is going to sell 2 million more than the original. Do you know how crazy that sounds?
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