One thing to keep in mind is certainly the launch of Guild Wars 2 at the end of the August. The hype around it was huge; they even had to stop sales to prevent servers from over flooding. GW2 might be just the thing that some of WoW players saw as revolutionary, or maybe just more interesting. There is also no subscription fee on GW2 so that could also be a factor in why people cross over. Let me just remind you, GW sold “only” 2 million copies and that was after two weeks, but they certainly showed that they care about their customers unlike Blizzard has in past.
However, Blizzard said that they are still very happy with Pandaria's week one sales. With this new expansion the active player base has tipped over 10 million again and WoW again has proved to be Blizzards money machine. Even though the Cataclysm got a half million more sales in first week, this result for Pandaria is still great; because when Cataclysm launched there were not so many factors to compromise its success.
Discuss this in our Forum
