It took five years to finish GW2,but it was time well spent for Bellevue’s ArenaNet, apparently.The studio has been overwhelmed by the early response to its massively multiplayer online fantasy game, which officially launches today.More than 1 million early orders were placed for the game, which costs $60 to $150, depending on the version. That means it’s already grossed at least $60 million before the start of regular retail sales.

ArenaNet President Mike O’Brien said it’s thrilling and stressful to launch a game with 45 virtual worlds that will be inhabited by millions of players around the world.O’Brien also is grateful that parent company NCsoft, a gaming giant based in Seoul, gave his 270-person Bellevue studio all the time it needed. “As we see the sales it’s so far ahead of any forecast and the sales are just tremendous and they’re just continuing at a tremendous rate, he said. “It’s obviously the right decision: Make sure the game is the game players are going to love before you release a game like this.

You see it in the fan reaction; you see it in the sales.”Early buyers were allowed to start playing at midnight Friday and they’ve come in hordes, flooding its data centers. The company has seen more than 400,000 concurrent players in the game, far more than it expected.The potential for the numbers to take an even bigger leap emerged when ArenaNet announced it had entered into a partnership with KongZhong, a Chinese digital entertainment company.

Under an agreement between the two companies, KongZhong will Buy Cheap GW2 Gold to the mainland China online game market.The big response led to a few early glitches. The game’s trading post, where players can buy virtual items and list them for sale, was overwhelmed by the surge. It’s practically unheard of especially in an industry that’s struggling,but O’Brien already is thinking about whether the company will have to temporarily halt sales of the game at some point until the infrastructure catches up.

If sales keep going through the roof and we get to a point where we would run out of capacity,we would certainly stop sales,he said,adding that we just want to be making the decisions that are right for the game in the long-term and not try to maximize sales this week, that kind of thing. Meanwhile,the company’s adding more and more servers at it data centers in the U.S.and Europe.Online worlds really are all about maintaining great worlds that people will keep loving year after year,he explained.We’re in this for the long-term.