Warcraft’s Expansion: 2.4 Million Copies sold in first 24 hours
Located here at Blizzards official site:
Thousands of retail stores around the world had their doors open at midnight on January 16 to welcome the crowds that had gathered outside, and within 24 hours of The Burning Crusade’s launch that night, nearly 2.4 million players worldwide had purchased the expansion.
That’s a lot of copies.
Neils Clark :: Jan.24.2007 :: Games ::
WoW’s expansion, Burning Crusade, makes it mandetory for players to purchase the expansion pack in order to keep playing the game. Unlike other Blizzard games, such as the Warcraft series, Diablo series, and Starcraft, one cannot continue without the expansion. Whereas in those games you can play without the expansion against others without it, in World of Warcraft you’re playing against expansion users who always have an advantage against you that you cannot overcome without some extreme amounts of skill, investment, and/or game-breaking exploitative abuse. In essence, Burning Crusade isn’t really optional. If you want to keep playing WoW, you have to buy Burning Crusade.
You could still level a toon up to 60, play the AH, or chat it up with guildies but I think that you’re right. In a social game, such as WoW, people are going to judge themselves by their peers. If their peers are all either level 64 or are busy leveling a Draeni/BE (engaging in the newly introduced Burning Crusade content), then they’ll feel a fairly overwhelming pressure to join in. It really is designed in such a way as to restrict established players from interacting in the ways that they’ve… established.
Sucks for me, I can’t buy BC until I’m done writing this one book about playing games too much.