No, the Celestial Steed mount did not outsell SC2: Wings of Liberty. You were mislead.
Some of you may remember this post from 2023 which quoted a claim that the Celestial Steed WoW mount available from the Blizzard store in 2010 made more money than the entirety of SC2: Wings Of Liberty. The claim was made by a former Blizzard employee, Jason "Thor" Hall AKA Pirate Software. This person's claim went viral and was widely covered by gaming press. The YT short (Entitled: "Microtransactions") has near 10 million views.
The claim is entirely unsubstantiated.
When he was asked to explain over on SC2 reddit in 2023 in a reply, which unfortunately seems to have gone entirely unnoticed by those reposting and publishing articles on it, Jason from his own reddit account Thorwich only had this nonsensical explanation when asked to back up his claim. The comment speaks for itself but it confirms that he has essentially he made it up based on guesswork, he has no actual numbers.
In his explanation, he cites crowd sourced data from a fansite on player mount ownership, a literal joke between colleagues at the time and the Starcraft 2: WoL sales figures. He then pours pure, outright speculation as to the costs of developing/marketing/maintaining SC2 on top to come up with his conclusion. It seems he held no insight on the financial performance of either product apart from rumour and publicly available information yet this story went viral and was not fact checked on the basis he was a former employee. Even if you accepted his own fudged up numbers, they do not account for the some $100m - $200m differential in SC2 sales vs the Celestial steed that he himself gives.
I discovered this ridiculous claim when I came across him due to the recent drama involving him in WoW HC. I am covering this following an off-hand comment I made over on LSF as I did not realise people were unaware this was an out and out fabrication with no actual source as at the time this explanation from him appears to have been buried or flew under the radar.
TL:DR: This story was complete nonsense and when questioned on Reddit the guy cited random crowd sourced statistics from a WoW fansite on who had bought the mount, applied that unreliable data to the WoW playerbase as a whole to give him Figure A (lower number) for the mount sales, compared it to SC2 sales figures to give him Figure B (higher number) then filled in the blanks with variables such as SC2 development/marketing/maintenance costs (of which he has no data nor insight except to say they exist) to create a fiction that Figure A was higher then Figure B.
EDIT: For those of you pointing out it was revenue not sales. Yes i mistitled and also typo'd misled, okay. But just on the subject of revenue, here's the following figures to digest based on things we actually know:
- We know SC2 sold at minimum 4.5million copies in 2010 alone per blizz's report which would total approx. $269m revenue based on retailing at $59.99. Hell, lets even say some of the sales were discounted and round down to $250m for your 4.5m copies sold,
- The oft-cited claim by WSJ (and likely where Pirate got his dev costs figure) that it was a $100m game was debunked in 2010 and a correction issued on this article which made the same claim as pirate re. costs and puts them more in the 8 figure region (subscription required, if no sub refer to the PC gamer article confirming the same.) but, okay, lets accept this figure for arguments sake.
- Blizzard has never released the revenue of the Steed specifically that I can tell, and no such figures exist for the 2010-2013 period. But okay, sure, lets accept Pirate's $84m best case scenario from his calculations aswell.
So here's the maths:
Deducting $100m assumed costs, from $250m in sales (minimum), it's $150m SC2 net profit vs the $84m net profit of the mount. It's not close or remotely equal in terms of money made, and thats the best case, perfect world scenario for Pirate's claim which he has provided zero evidence to support, outside of "ex-blizzard employee btw". That's leaving aside the fact I am lowballing SC2 revenue majorly as the general consensus is that it's closer to 6m copies for SC2 WoL prior to HoTS coming out.
Is it definitely a bit of an industry indictment that a horse could make half the money a full AAA game does, sure. Is it what he claimed? No.
Further EDIT: Changed use of the word "revenue" to "net profit" in places where its usage was incorrect.
EDIT: PCGamer article mysteriously has dropped off the face of the earth following this post, here is a link to the GameSpot article instead which also confirms WSJ was mistaken re. 100m dev costs.