Cataclysm Sets New Sales Record

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has set a new mark as the fastest-selling PC game of all time, and you'll never guess which game it beat.

In what will probably not be the most shocking news you read all day, Blizzard Entertainment announced that Cataclysm, the third expansion to the enduring hit MMO World of Warcraft, sold over 3.3 million copies in its four 24 hours of release to become the fastest-selling PC game of all time. Equally unsurprising is that the game it surpassed to become the new king of the hill was its direct predecessor, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, which moved more than 2.8 million copies in its first day.

Cataclysm enjoyed more than 10,000 midnight openings as part of its simultaneous worldwide release and roughly 15,000 gamers attended official launch events in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Russia, Taiwan and elsewhere. "We want to thank all of our new, existing, and returning players throughout the world for their incredible enthusiasm and support, and we look forward to hearing what they think about all the new content," said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, who described it as "our best expansion yet."

Cataclysm also easily bested the first-day sales of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty, another Blizzard release, which topped one million copies within 24 hours of its launch in August and became the best-selling PC game of the year in a day.