StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void launches same day as Fallout 4, emerges unscathed
That's what the sales figures seem to say.
I worried about StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void. I know the series has a legion of faithful fans but launching the same day as Fallout 4 seemed like madness. Blizzard could have picked any other time of year, presumably, but instead it chose 10th November for a real-time strategy swan song.
The day and week came and Fallout 4 arrived like a nuclear warhead, blasting SC2: LOTV to the sidelines along with Steam Hardware and Rise of the Tomb Raider no less. But upon closer inspection, Legacy of the Void emerged relatively unscathed.
Blizzard confirmed to Eurogamer that SC2: LOTV sold more than 1m units in 24 hours, clarifying a vague official tweet that had announced "over 1 million warped in" a few days after launch - whatever that meant. That puts Legacy of the Void exactly in line with how the previous two StarCraft 2 games sold.
SC2: Wings of Liberty (2010), the first game in the trilogy, also sold 1m units in 24 hours, and then went on to sell 1.5m in 48 hours and 3m in a month. SC2: Heart of the Swarm (2013) sold 1.1m units in 48 hours.
On that evidence, SC2: Legacy of the Void outpaced Heart of the Swarm and may even challenge Wings of Liberty in terms of sales.
To compare that to how other big boxed Blizzard games have sold: Diablo 3 (2012) sold a phenomenal 3.5m units in 24 hours and then 6.3m in a week; and World of Warcraft's most recent expansion Warlords of Draenor sold 3.3m units in 24 hours.
Of Blizzard's completely new series, both Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are free-to-play. But Overwatch, the 'in beta' and 'out in spring' multiplayer team shooter, will be a boxed game, for PC as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
