Last week, we saw analyst reports that sales of Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard’s latest World of Warcraft expansion, were less than most had hoped for. Those reports pinned total sales in the game’s first week to about 700,000 copies—not a great start for a game with such a large built-in fan base.

But then, all of a sudden, the numbers turned. The same analysts came back a week later, announcing, “We  think  recent  reports  of  weak  retail  sales  for  Mists  of  Pandaria  may  fail  to reflect a channel shift toward a greater percentage of digital sales.” Now they’re saying that Mists will likely land at 4.5 million copies sold in the third quarter, making it an extremely successful expansion indeed (and outstripping the 3.3 million Cataclysm units moved since that expansion launched in 2010).

The analyst group is also expecting a subscriber uptick from 9.1 million to 9.8 million.

So the moral of the story here is…who knows? The analysts originally left out digital sales and claimed those wouldn’t make up for low physical sales, then came back and said the exact opposite. We’ll just have to wait on Blizzard’s official numbers to get any sense of what’s actually happening.

Thoughts?

[VB]

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