StarCraft 2 Heart of the Swarm Sales Numbers

In case gamers hadn't heard, StarCraft 2 is pretty popular. It's first expansion, or rather the first proper release of the game, sold extremely well, and now its predecessor, StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm is following a similar trend.

Just today Blizzard Entertainment announced that Heart of the Swarm has sold some 1.1 million copies spread out over both physical and digital sales. Blizzard did not provide a breakdown between digital and retail copies, however.

What's most impressive about the 1.1 million-unit tally is that it took Heart of the Swarm only two days to achieve it. While many games take months to cross the million-unit threshold, if they do at all, StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm did it in a fraction of the time.

Comparatively, Wings of the Liberty, the aforementioned first release for StarCraft 2 sold about 1.1 million units in its first day, and about 1.5 million units by the 48-hour mark. Obviously, anticipation was extremely high for Wings of Liberty — what with it being the first new StarCraft in nearly a decade — but the fact that Blizzard could sustain such a high turnout with the next iteration is impressive.

Blizzard also revealed that they had about 1.1 total viewers tune into their launch-day festivities on Twitch. The concurrent viewership for the Heart of the Swarm topped off at 250,000 viewers.

For PC gamers, news of a successful launch is surely comforting, especially considering the failures of Maxis' SimCity. While that game was able to amass a large turnout, server problems, connectivity issues, and all around bad design have left many gamers reeling.

Heart of the Swarm, by all measures, did not deliver such a disappointment, but is actually a rousing success. Yes, Blizzard did botch the Diablo 3 launch, but somehow they were able to release Heart of Swarm into the wild with nary a hitch.

Were you one of the 1.1 million that picked up StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm at launch? Did you participate in any of the launch-day festivities?

StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm is available now for the PC.

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Source: GamaSutra