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WoW: Shadowlands pre-sales are “well ahead of any prior expansion”

Shadowlands has the biggest pre-order numbers in WoW history

World of Warcraft has been running since 2004, and while there are certainly MMORPGs that have been on the market longer, few have maintained the sort of consistent popularity that WoW has managed. We’re now just a month away from the WoW: Shadowlands release date, and early sales have been huge – bigger than any other expansion in the game’s history, in fact.

For WoW, “franchise engagement is at its highest level for this stage ahead of an expansion in a decade, with pre-sales well ahead of any prior expansion,” Activision Blizzard COO Daniel Alegre says as part of the company’s latest financial earnings report. Alegre says that WoW has “seen unprecedented engagement trends since the subscriber base doubled following the launch of Classic last year.”

Blizzard’s games – including both WoW and the rest of the catalogue – had an average of 30 million monthly active users for the most recent quarter. 10 million of those users are Overwatch players, but the company doesn’t say how much WoW contributed to the full figure – just that WoW’s player count is “stable” after the dramatic increase last year caused by Classic.

Shadowlands is landing in November after its initial delay, so we’ll find out how the hype pays off soon enough.

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On the other side of Activision Blizzard, the financial report also revealed some details on Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War Season 1 and its integration with Warzone.