WoW Factor

6:00 PM -- The World of Warcraft expansion, The Burning Crusade, sold 2.4 million copies in the first 24 hours of its life, WoW owner Blizzard Entertainment announced today.

BC retails for $40 a shot, so that's a $96 million revenue day. To put it in geek perspective, that's nearly twice the opening-day take for Revenge of the Sith (which was about $50 million).

Blizzard doesn't get every dime of that, since you can buy the game elsewhere. (Right now, you have to; the Blizzard site says they're out of stock.) But just to have fun with the numbers... The games division of Vivendi , Blizzard's owner, reported third-quarter revenues of €182 million ($237 million). One day of BC is equal to about 40 percent of an entire quarter.

Now, FiOS TV and U-verse certainly are worthy projects. But their big triumphs are tied to future demand. In the here-and-now, there's a not unrelated revenue stream already flitting across the network. Yes, casual games make up more total revenue than massively multiplayer fare. But WoW represents a kind of brand and audience that, so far, the big carriers can't tap.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading