Burning Crusade Breaking Records

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced that World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade sold through approximately 3.5 million copies within one month following its mid-January launch in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia. This includes nearly 1.6 million sold in Europe, and more than 1.9 million sold in regions that play on North American realms, including more than 100,000 copies in Australasia. World of Warcraft's worldwide subscriber base now numbers more than 8.5 million and is continuing to grow as new and returning players join existing players in the game.

Blizzard previously announced that this first expansion set for World of Warcraft sold through nearly 2.4 million copies worldwide in its first 24 hours - more than any other PC game in history had sold within an entire first month of availability. With approximately 3.5 million copies sold through, The Burning Crusade has now established the new one-month record for PC-game sales.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade is Blizzard's first expansion for its subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft. It adds an extensive amount of new content to the game, including an increase in the level cap, complete with new spells, abilities, and talents for players to acquire as they advance their characters; huge new outdoor zones and dungeons for players to explore after they journey through the Dark Portal into the shattered world of Outland; two new playable races; flying mounts; a new character profession: jewelcrafting; and much more.

Following the initial launch of the expansion on January 16, Blizzard held a highly successful open beta test in Korea and then commercially released The Burning Crusade for players there on February 12. The company is currently working with its partners to localize the content into Simplified and Traditional Chinese for mainland China and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau and release the expansions in those regions as soon as possible.