Sold presumably refering to physical copies shipped to retailers plus digital copies sold

Sales are for first month of release (ie Dec 7th - Jan 7th)

VGChartz has the game at 3.3 million sold to the 8th of January.

That then leaves 1.4 million copies either on shelves or digital sales, which seems a tad higher than I would have expected. Maybe it's because the game has sold very well online, or maybe there is some difficulty tracking the game in some of the regions that it sells quite well in?

Regardless, good to see Blizzard being reward for the solid effort they put in

Thoughts

That doesn't surprise me. VGC is not good at tracking software sales. This may be one of the largest adjustments I've seen though.

VGC only tracks physical copies of WoW (3.3m). The rest are most likely digital copies.

Apparently Cataclysm is the fastest selling PC game of all time with that 4.7 million.

Really? I figuered it would do more digital sales than retail since anyone who has it is connected to the internet and usually has their payment info in as well. Not to mention Blizzard lets you pre download so when it releases you can start almost immediatly. Unless they made changes since I last played.

pretty much this, the digital copy did amazing, and that with reason - because many wow players really wanted to start playing at midnight (myself included) and there were much more than 500 people online on the realm i play on alone.

500?That doesn't say much .__.

the 'who is' tool is limited, sadly. but take 500 per realm WW, and you get like half a million already. ^^ and since it tends to be much more, every newb (like me) could tell that the ammount of Digital Copies sold has to be sick.

Activision Blizzard must have broken revenue records for a game-publisher/developer with Black Ops and Cataclysm

Don't forget digital sales. In North America, over 50% of the total PC/Mac games sales are from digital sales.