Vivendi's overall stock value has dropped by 28% in the past year, so they're selling off assets to try to drop their expenses and cash out while those assets are hot. That's pretty much the basis for them considering selling off anything they have.

According to vgchartz, sales for SCII ending in May 2012 are at 3.53 million, well short of (external) analyst predictions of 7 million by the end of the 2010. Even "conservative" external estimates were as high as 5 million. That's in spite of the fact that it sold 1.5 million copies in the first week (apparently breaking some first week sales records).

Personally, I was expecting this to happen (as further proof that financial analysts don't know what they're talking about). My own theory is that controversial issues with the gameplay aside, many analysts didn't realize that much like CS, the main driving factor behind StarCraft's high adoption was its entrenched competitive scene, especially in Korea. For those players, there just wasn't any compelling reason to "upgrade" as Red_Avatar pointed out.

Also, Blizzard played the Long Tail with SC1, continuing to provide strong support for it long after the original game was released. It seemed that the analysts just took a superficial look at SC's total units sold and just naturally assumed it would sell more and would continue to sell more after launch.

That doesn't include licenses mainly sold in Korean gaming clubs and copies sold through Battle.net.

The gaming club copies are negligible. Do you have a sense of how many copies were sold digitally? Have they said anything? I'm guessing Blizzard's online store 2 years ago didn't have the userbase they seemed to have to D3 sales (since "normal" people were still warming up to the idea of DD at the time). But that's just a guess, has Blizzard made any statements or Activision said anything to investors to indicate how it did digitally?

I read somewhere that it sold more than 4.5 million copies, can't remember where exactly, though. Maybe it was one of AB's financial reports for this or last year (thought it was Wikipedia, but nah, the number there is 3 million for the first month).

EDIT: Will do some research tonight, in the middle of installing Windows 8 RP right now.

Approaching 4.5 million sales, in February 2011.

http://news.bigdownload.com/2011/02/09/starcraft-ii-sales-approach-4-5-million-units-still-no-release/

No doubt they are above the 5 million right now, maybe even the 7 million, who knows, considering it has been more than a year since AB's financial conference in Feb 2011.

For a PC-only RTS game, it is a pretty good number.

I don't know that I'd hope for basically doubling sales after the initial sales period sales seem to have been declining at a steady rate, there's no reason to hope they're much over 5-5.5 million unless they've said so. At any rate, that does say digital sales weren't really great in comparison to physical, which is to be expected 2 years ago and for a game which sold worldwide, specifically to places that probably have broadband caps.

I'm also guessing this is pretty below their expectations, though I don't see how a profitable game could be considered a failure, I'm not an unreasonable shareholder looking for imaginary growth.

Thanks for digging that up, I appreciate it.

Has anyone mentioned the Korean item-duplication exploit in Diablo 3? I'm really glad Blizzard is keeping my server separate from theirs. Those guys ruin every MMO with a 'market'. Ultima Online, Lineage, AO, RO (which is a natively Korean game anyway, but then most people play on custom private servers now anyway, with ludicrously ramped up settings for item drops and XP gain), the list goes on. I haven't played any of the latest Final Fantasy games, but I heard that there's some kind of MMO system since 13, and it was ruined by Chinese players within the first week.

What is that? Some sort of a bug? I haven't really used the AH much, have only sold a dozen items, and bought only two so far so I am not up to date with things relative to it.

It's the same thing happend in Diablo2 which everyone knew would happen and were just waiting for someone to find the first one. It's a classic item dupe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjIdTQetPo0&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cohsGbA_9-A&feature=player_embedded

http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/uu2rr/crafting_items_freely_using_backserver_bug/c4yjdc0

Indefinite downtime for Asia because of duping:
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Diablo-3-Item-Duping-Cues-Indefinite-Shutdown-Asia-Server-43448.html

An exploit on how to cancel Auctions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spMS3Hhk1FA&feature=player_embedded

Locking down region related versions of the game (initially all versions were global):
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/blizzard-suddenly-decides-to-lock-down-russian-language-version


All this is just a complete mess, some of the worst decisions they made with this game are now driving them into a corner of their own design.

About this, people fucked themselves up, at least talking about those that I've seen have been posting on the forums. How? Sorry, but buying a key from CDKEYSONLINE.com is really a good way to get scammed. Dunno if actual versions from Battle.net are affected.

Thanks for the other links, I'll continue avoiding the AH, as I've been doing this whole week.

I agree it's a doggy practice and even Valve has issues with it, but it's still a bad practice from Blizzard revoking a feature after the sale was made.

They made a special Starcraft 2 version for Russia with a different payment method, it's weird to make an oversight on the same issue only a game later.

I'll just keep my 'grind-till-you-find' method, tyvm. That way, I'll either find what it is I want, or I'll lose interest and stop looking, and be glad I didn't spend cash on an impulse purchase that I'd probably be bored with after a week or less anyway.

Thanks for that link. What bothers me is that for such a high-profile title like SCII, all of the links I've seen so far don't provide a clear and accurate breakdown for SCII sales by region and distribution method. I wonder if that sort of information is reserved for shareholders.