World of Warcraft Is Setting Records (PC)
Blizzard is trying to keep up as World of Warcraft flies off the shelves.
By Rainier Van Autrijve | Dec. 1, 2004

Blizzard is obviously thrilled by the World of Warcraft success as sales numbers show WoW has broken day-one sales records in North America. World of Warcraft sold over 240,000 copies at retailers in North America on Tuesday, November 23, selling more in its first 24 hours than any other PC game in history.

Within the first day, over 200,000 players created World of Warcraft accounts, and over 100,000 were playing the game simultaneously, quickly filling all original 40+ World of Warcraft servers. This created some frustration with a lot of people wanting to play but instead experiencing long wait times or annoying lag, so Blizzard quickly scrambled together an additional 40 servers to meet the demand.
"We were all extremely pleased with the success of World of Warcraft on its first day of launch," said Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment. "Once we saw the numbers for the first day, we knew that we had to immediately increase capacity to accommodate the huge numbers of players joining our game. We're glad so many people are enjoying World of Warcraft, and we are dedicated to supporting a fun and smooth game experience for everyone."

"World of Warcraft has once again shown that Blizzard consistently delivers the best games in the industry," said Robert McKenzie, vice president of merchandising at GameStop. "It sold better than any other PC game this year - in fact, World of Warcraft enjoyed the best day-one sell-through GameStop has ever seen on a PC title!"
By the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, World of Warcraft sold a total of over 350,000 copies, with reports from various retail stores that they had completely sold out. A big demand is obviously a good thing, but it also means Blizzard needs to continuously add more servers to accommodate the players. Therefore, they are looking into making more game copies available as server capacity is increased.