Story: The first paid mount in WoW earned more than StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
Interesting insights from the ex-Blizzard Entertainment employee, but I doubt that it's 100% true.
The information was shared by Jason Thor Hall, the founder of Pirate Software studio. At Blizzard Entertainment, he worked on the project's infrastructure security.
The first paid mount in WoW was called Celestial Steed and was initially sold for $25. Later, the price was reduced to $15.
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In 2010, Blizzard Entertainment reported that a queue of 140,000 people had formed to purchase Celestial Steed. The mount brought the company $3.5 million in the first three hours of sales. The limited number of mounts at the start (codes were not generated automatically) contributed to this.
In 2010, World of Warcraft had 12 million active subscribers.
The total sales of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty exceeded 6 million.
If we do a rough calculation and estimate that the average price of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was around $25 (taking into account sales), the game earned about $150 million. For the WoW mount to surpass the game in sales, it would need to be sold in a quantity of 8.5 million at an average price of $17.5 (which in reality will be lower due to the various discounts).
The story is certainly interesting but seems a little unrealistic. Perhaps Jason embellished the picture a bit to get a viral headline.
SC2 also cost $100M to produce. So if we're talking profits, it's more like 50M using your numbers. That's about 2.8 million celestial steeds, which is a much more reasonable figure considering WoW had 12 million subscribers in 2010.