In reply to Chaddly:
maybe a silly question, but why would they wait until weeks after the game goes live to ship it? When they had all this time to get it ready lol.
I can’t really speak to the official answer, but based on what I have seen over the years, how many copies are made/ordered is generally based on projections. That is basically the history of Collector’s Edition sales, which may include Modern WoW numbers, but likely the interest in other classic versions of the game. The last thing they want is to have thousands of copies sitting in a warehouse for years.
I don’t know if they just had a limited amount they could order, the projections they had were just very modest, or that the interest simply was greater than anyone imagined.