Starcraft II deploys 1.5 million in 48 hours

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is orchestrating a full-scale Zerg rush on gamers. Blizzard Entertainment today announced that its sci-fi real-time strategy game sold more than 1 million copies worldwide through its launch day, and 1.5 million within 48 hours of going on sale.

Blizzard proclaimed Starcraft II the fastest-selling strategy game of all time, as well as the best-selling PC game of 2010. In the company's announcement, an executive from GameStop went on the record calling Starcraft II the specialty retailer's "fastest-selling PC game since Blizzard launched World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King."

The second expansion to the hugely successful massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Wrath of the Lich King launched in November of 2008 and sold 2.8 million copies on day one. The game's first expansion was also an instant hit for Blizzard, selling 2.4 million copies on its January 2007 launch day. Not even those blockbusters could hold a candle to Blizzard parent company Activision's biggest hit, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which launched last November on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, selling 4.7 million on its first day of sale and laying claim to the title of "largest entertainment launch ever."

Obviously, Starcraft II's debut is only the beginning of its sales story. Analysts have big expectations for Blizzard's latest, with estimates for the game's 2010 sales total reaching as high as 6.5 million copies.

As the first new stand-alone game from Blizzard since 2004's World of Warcraft, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty focuses primarily on the human Terran faction with a 29-mission single-player campaign. However, the multiplayer component also lets gamers wage interstellar real-time strategy warfare as the hivelike Zerg and the technologically advanced Protoss factions. Two sequels focusing on those factions--Legacy of the Void and Heart of the Swarm--are also in development.