Rachel Weber for Gamesindustry International:

Blizzard’s latest release, Diablo III, sold 3.5 million in the first 24 hours on sale, setting a new record for the fastest selling PC game, and boasted 6.3 million players after a single week.

In retrospect, maybe it’s a bit more understandable now, when Blizzard had trouble scaling up the Battle.net servers to manage connections to this huge avalanche of new players.

Weber notes that when you factor in all the World of Warcraft players who bought an Annual Pass to get Diablo III for free, the number jumps from 3.5 to 4.7 million. 6.3 million gamers had jumped on board by the end of the first week. Just staggering.