Blizzard announced 3.3 millions units sold through customers in the first 24 hours ( sell through, not shipped and they actually do have ways to track it).

VGChartz has 2.4 millions units sold the first 5 days....

Why bother putting sales numbers when you know they are so far off ??? ( Blizzard announced the first 24h numbers on the 13th).

Heck why bother tracking sales for a PC game like Wow when you know digital downloads play such a huge role in those games..

because VGChartz doesn't track the digital copies. Blizzard's 3.3m will include that which we all know so why even make a thread about it.

HEY ALtair... you are the best warrior! :)

VGCharz's 2.4 M is retail copies only.  You said  yourself that "digital downloads play such a huge role in those games" so with that considered plus the fact that a game like WoW is probably much more DD focused than say Call of Duty, I don't see much problem with the numbers...

VG doens't track digital.  I guess the question is more is it worth partially tracking if the difference is this much?  Looks like the real sold number must be much higher than VG.

What I'd like to see is games tracked with some sort of status flag to indicate whether the number is partial - i.e. retail only - or full - i.e. so far as we know the sales represent all sales.  That would be handy and prevent the usual cock up comparisons that take place with partial data.

Vchartzs doesnt track digital, which is why PC games seem low usually. 

All the rest were digital downloads, still surprising though, I mean if there were no digital downloads would Cataclysm still sell 3.3 million in the first 24 hours? Additionally, WotLK had 2.8 million in it's first 24 hours without any digital copies right?

Nah a huge part of the first 24h were probably digital copies.

How it works is people preorder straight from blizzard, cataclysm starts downloading even before the release date and you can start playing the expansion as soon as they switch the server on release date...