From the day we began work on DAoC we have had a few rock solid principles. First among those was that our game's capacity was geared to handle 100K subscribers during its launch phase. We have been very clear about this from day one both with the community and with our distribution partner Vivendi Universal. Based on both of our estimates, the decision was made to have an initial run to match that number. This would allow us to have the correct amount of bandwidth, servers and CS people to have a great launch. Even up to last week nobody at VU (who of course relies on the numbers coming from the retailers) had any reason to think that we would exceed that expectation. I asked them on almost a daily basis how the pre-orders were going and it was always the same. However, then something changed...

Over the last two weeks (especially this past week) pre-orders and reserves in the various retailers have gone through the roof. While I can't reveal actual numbers, the fact is that we are have more pre-sales than any other game in this genre has had to date (at least that is what the retailers are telling us) and since these numbers are so high, the retailers are now very concerned that they will sell out their stock immediately. They are asking VU to manufacture more copies immediately. Now, under normal circumstances the manufacturer would be happy to do that but in this case, there is one big problem and that is that this is a MMORPG and that the infrastructure has to be in place to support it. Thus, a phone call took place on Friday between VU and us...