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2.8 million box sales in one day. I guess that means Wrath of the Lich King did pretty well. Of course, the only other team crunching harder than Blizzard is your own GamerDNA team, so our cross game comparison is going to have to wait one more week. So let’s take a look at the basic numbers we’re seeing for the World of Warcraft expansion, and throw in a little GamerDNA flavor.

 

Here’s how to read this one. The pool consists of GamerDNA members with World of Warcraft in their profiles. Steve the Data Man pulled data in chunks to smooth out any deviations due to non-recurring events like patch days, holidays, launch days for other games, etc. The chunk of data representing seven days starting three months ago translates as 25.5% of the pool logged in and played WoW. Two months ago, that number dropped to 24.5%. And one month ago, the number dropped to 23%. A downward trend is to be expected for a game that is several years old – the number of people who have tried it grows every month, and the number of new people trying it remains constant or drops. The fact that their downward trend is hovering at one percent is actually pretty astounding. Just how astounding is a matter for a future column.

Anyhow, in the seven days before the launch of Lich King, despite the buzz around achievements and the last minute hoarding of gold and supplies, we see another small drop – down to 22.5% of everyone who has played the game. This teaches us a valuable lesson – the fact that the chattering classes online were reporting a pre-launch increase did not apply to the playerbase as a whole, but only among the chattering classes. In other words, the truly hardcore were getting their ducks in a row (see more below on that demographic), but the casual player targeted by Blizzard didn’t bother.

Instead, they all came back when there was something they wanted to do. The seven days post launch saw a total of 28.2% logging in to play.

And, if the GamerDNA numbers can be extrapolated (and much of our analysis to date indicates that we can to some extent), that means that most of the people who bought it on day one actually played it on day one.

Let’s take a look at a uniquely GamerDNA metric – the guild pages.

You see a massive spike two days before the launch as the most passionate users got organized: 38% of all the guild pages created on GamerDNA that day were for WoW. You can see that on LK’s launch day, and the Saturday immediately following the launch, activity is at an all time low – probably because everyone was logged in playing the video game, instead of playing the internet game.

But actually, the two week period bracketing the launch of Lich King were not typical for us. The average percentage of WOW guild pages created each day was 21 percent for the previous month, and 24% for the month before that.

One thing that is interesting about the WoW guild page numbers is that there wasn’t much impact from the launch of Warhammer Online. Their proportion went down, but the raw numbers of new hosting pages being created remained remarkably consistent. In fact, the number of people making WoW pages increased slightly in the first two weeks after the launch of WAR.

GamerDNA activity has so far been a decent predictor of the level of user anticipation and of initial sales. We’ll be refining these measurements in the months to come. Stay tuned! And as always, we’re listening to any suggestions you might have.
 

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