Well, now we know. Blizzard have officially announced that World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King is the fastest-selling PC game of all time, chalking up more than 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours of availability.

If you were curious, the record didn't have to move very far - the former fastest-selling game was of course 2.4 million copies of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, back in January 2007.

More than 15,000 stores across the world held midnight launches (including several in Australia), to get the game to the gamers as soon as possible. The game was released simultaneously in North America, Russia, Argentina, Chile and Europe on November 13, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand got theirs on November 14th, while South Korea, Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan had to wait until November 18th.

Mike Morhaime, CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment comments:

“We’re grateful for the incredible support that players around the world have continued to show for World of Warcraft. Wrath of the Lich King contains some of the best content we’ve created for the game so far, and we look forward to seeing even more players log in to experience it in the days ahead.”

Just prior to the Lich King's launch, Blizzard revealed that the World of Warcraft playerbase had expanded to more than 11 million players - cementing its position as the world's most popular subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (try saying that three times quickly). For all the comments and predictions of a "WoW-killer", it seems that they're still the original - and the best.

(...and if you were curious about whether or not the game would crack the five million mark that Matt Warner reported on: on paper, the maths suggests that if the trend continues as it has started, that milestone should definitely be achievable.)