StarCraft II launches worldwide

Blizzard's highly anticipated StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has launched globally, three years since it was first announced and twelve years since the original game was released.

In the UK a midnight launch took place at GAME's flagship store on Oxford Street, with hundreds of fans queuing to be first to get their hands on a boxed copy of the game, proving that a PC game can still be a big hit at retail if it's launch is turned into an event.

Blizzard had rolled out vice president of international business, Mike Ryder, to talk to the press, heavily media trained and sticking to the script – the developer makes the games it wants to play, he stated multiple times to GamesIndustry.biz, unperturbed by trends and hype in the PC market.

"I guess there's a way to look at it from a more analytic perspective, where's the market going and all that sort of thing, but we really feel like we have a great real-time strategy game franchise in StarCraft, and our development team was passionate about making the next StarCraft game," he said.

"So for us there's nothing unusual about it at all, it just seems to be a very natural thing to bring the market the successor to one of the most successful games that we've ever made."

Sales of the game are expected to be phenomenal for a PC title, although true numbers are likely to be difficult to track. While the game is expected to be number one in the UK next week - with the benefit of an early Tuesday release - sales via digital downloads are not tracked in the UK by Chart-Track.

There are similar issues in the US, although VGChartz' latest estimate is that the game had reached 800,000 pre-orders in the region before launch. Fry's Electronics held the official launch in North America, with GameStop opening over 3000 stores out of hours to sell the game.

Cowan and Company analyst Doug Creutz has said that he expects the game to sell around 5 million units in its first year of release. Janco Partners' Mike Hickey estimates 7 million sales, resulting in sales of over $350 million. The original game has sold over ten million units since launch.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...ches-worldwide