World of Warcraft smashes European sales records

15 February 2005 16:53 GMT / By Stuart Miles

World of Warcraft has smashed European day one sales this week. The game from the creators of Baluder's Gate managed to sell over 380,000 copies in its first weekend, 280,000 of which were estimated as day one sales.

The game, which was launched on Friday 11 February is a subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) has become the fastest-growing online game in European history.

More than 290,000 players created World of Warcraft accounts during the first weekend, and 100,000 of those were playing the game concurrently on the first day. A first time ever peak concurrency of over 180,000 players in Europe was reached during the first weekend.

To support the European launch, Blizzard deployed over 80 servers at the World of Warcraft data centres in Paris and Frankfurt; additional servers are on standby as new players subscribe to the game.