World of Warcraft tops fastest-selling PC game rankings

Blizzard's long-awaited massively multiplayer title World of Warcraft has become the fastest selling PC game ever in North America, with the developer revealing that over 350,000 copies sold in its first weekend at retail.

Over 240,000 units of the game sold across the continent in the first 24 hours, with over 200,000 game accounts created in the first day and 100,000 players online concurrently by 5pm PST, forcing Blizzard to double its server capacity to 80 systems.

The immense success of the game goes some way to explaining the teething troubles it experienced over its first weekend on sale, with some players complaining of long waits to get onto servers and massively overcrowded areas in the game.

However, the developer is working on ensuring that it has enough server capacity to accommodate all of its players, and may even restrict the shipping of additional stock to retail to prevent servers from being flooded again before it can put more robust infrastructure in place.

In a statement last night, the company said that it "is currently evaluating its ability to ship additional games to retailers, given the unexpectedly high demand on the servers," but assured consumers that it will ship further copies when it can accommodate all the players connecting to the game.

World of Warcraft launched in North America on November 23rd, and is not expected to arrive in Europe until early in 2005 - although further beta phases are planned for European gamers between now and then.