Game Saint Blog Games, Online Games and Gaming Related News

Online gamers, bow before the king.

According to developer Blizzard, the recently released World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King sold over 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours of availability, making it the single fastest selling PC game in history.

In an official statement, Blizzard CEO and co founder Mike Morhaime expressed thanks.

"We're grateful for the incredible support that players around the world have continued to show for World of Warcraft," he said. "Wrath of the Lich King contains some of the best content we've created for the game so far, and we look forward to seeing even more players log in to experience it in the days ahead."

He didn't, however, express much surprise. That's because the second fastest selling PC game of all time is none other than the first World of Warcraft expansion, The Burning Crusade, which sold through roughly 2.4 million copies in its opening day.

Those numbers are just as stunning as they look. To give some context, it took EA's chart-topping evolutionary simulation Spore a good three weeks to hit the two million mark. And with 11 million active Warcraft subscribers out there, expect more records to be broken before the year is over.

My Top Ten Game List...




What's yours?

The release date for Halo Wars got a bit more specific today as Microsoft announced the Xbox 360 exclusive RTS will be released worldwide in February. Naturally, given that it's a Halo game, you'll get to dish out some extra cash for the Limited Collector's Edition which is full of Halo goodies. Just don't expect anything quite as substantial as a helmet for a small, cat-sized animal of your choice.



Among the contents of the collector's edition is Halo Wars: Genesis, a graphic novel detailing a mission involving the Convenant's interest in Harvest; a unique Honor Guard Wraith for use in-game; early access to the three new Halo 3 maps that comprise the Mythic Map Pack; and two other slightly more ambiguous items. One of them is the Spirit of Fire patch, which the press release explains lets you "start the journey as an official Spirit of Fire crew member." The other is a collection of six Leader cards -- that's not a particularly clear description. We know Leaders are essentially the game's Hero units, but it's unclear if these are simply trading cards with the Leader units plastered on them or something more significant. We asked Microsoft and they let us know they're simply trading cards and that they won't have any impact on the game.

This package will run you $80 -- not a terrible deal if this actually gives you the actual Mythic Map Pack, since that's likely to cost $10 on its own. As an extra incentive to preorder, certain retailers will offer a download for a unique in-game Warthog sporting flame decals. That seems a bit out of place in a Halo game, but people do love them some flame decals.

A great new blog from IMVU cofounder
I recently have been reading a new blog by Eric Ries, one of the founders of IMVU. The URL is http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com and the RSS feed is here. I’ve found it to be a great source of thinking around both games and metrics, two of my favorite topics. It’s quickly become one of my favorite blogs.

For those of you guys who haven’t spent much time looking at IMVU, here’s a good summary from GigaOm, including the statistics below:

• About 1.7 million user-generated items have been uploaded to the IMVU catalog
• Users create most content offline with industry-standard modeling tools such as Maya and Blender
• Individual content creators can take their earnings and sell them on third party web sites
• As with Second Life, IMVU users retain intellectual property rights to content submitted to the IMVU catalog
• About 100,000 users are registered to be IMVU content creators, but the number of consistent creators is in the tens of thousands
• IMVU users often sell their credits to other users via third-party web sites — also fine with Cary. “We observe it sort of casually,” he said.
• Demographic: Largest cohort is teens; 60 percent of users are female, 60 percent are American
• 50-70K concurrency is typical, with peaks in the high 70s
• IMVU areas are more like virtual rooms restricted to 10 avatars or fewer; Cary estimated 90 percent of those room interactions are person-to-person, anyway.

Eric has already written some great articles from his experience at IMVU, including articles on:

• common distribution models for online businesses
• gaining distribution advantages on the iPhone
• doing market research for product feedback
• a/b testing products

I’d encourage you to read more games+web+metrics goodness.

KP beefing up on games
Another interesting note is that it looks like KP has recently been beefing up their games focus. These days, Eric is a venture advisor for Kleiner Perkins, after 4 years at IMVU. He also joins the recently made partner Bing Gordon, a cofounder of EA, who quickly went on a tear making investments in games companies like:

• Facebook social gaming powerhouse Zynga
• mobile games company Ngmoco (from EA veterans)
• GoGii (from the Jamdat founders)

They also have Chi-Hua Chien, who sourced the Facebook for Accel Partners, and who is obviously a great resource for the intersection of social web and games.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the blog!