14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, Blizzard released information about the sales performance of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty in the first two days of availability. While initial estimates were stating that there were 1.8 million copies sold in Europe and the two Americas alone on day one, Blizzard's data showed that StarCraft II sold 1 million units in its first 24 hours and went up to 1.5 million after another day, falling short of the initial predictions.
This may not be entirely so, thinks Lazard Capital analyst Colin Sebastian, as this information is not really accurate and does not gives a real insight on how well the game actually performed. “While this number is light of some forecasts, we view this as largely a U.S. [plus] Europe number, with the majority of users in Korea still not reflected in the count,” Sebastian said, according to Gamasutra.
He continued to comment that, “In other words, once the game in Korea shifts from 'free trial' to purchases, we expect the overall user base to be closer to the forecasts, and sales figures not as front-end loaded as expected. Moreover, once the game launches in China, and 'game room' competition intensifies, we expect to see a more meaningful contribution from recurring revenues for the title. Based on strength in Korea, we believe that StarCraft [II] can still achieve [around 4 million] users over the first couple of months, and up to 6.5 million users during the fiscal year.”
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has become the fastest-selling strategy title ever to be released, according to Blizzard. The game's success is actually hard to measure, because of the varying business model that its developer and publisher has offered depending on region. While in the West users pay 60 dollars or Euro to have life-time access to all that the game has to offer, other developing regions can pay less for hourly installments of play-time, meaning that the amount of money Blizzard makes from StarCraft is not quantifiable only in copies sold.