No, that is not a lot of StarCraft players. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (a game I have not interest in, personally) sold 4.7 million units in it's first day. That's 3 times as many units in 24 hours as the entire year of StarCraft sales you quoted. Over 5 million sales in it's first month in the US alone, compared to 9.5 million over 10 years worldwide for StarCraft. Was StarCraft a big deal in it's heyday? Sure, no one is trying to deny that. But compared to the modern gaming industry, it's a drop in the bucket. Modern Warfare 2 apparently has approx. 25 million unique players as of March 2010. We live in a world now where a video game release can outdo a major motion picture in openning weekend profits. StarCraft may have a venerable history and loud crowd of fervent fans, but they have a frighteningly small portion of today's gaming crowd, especially in the US and UK.
Note: Sales data from Wikipedia, which has links to the original articles with the results.
You are comparing a game that came out in 2005 for seven platforms - counting mobile - with one that came out in 98 for PCs/Macs. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty_2) I think the game market in general was smaller then. A better comparison would have been Starcraft vs Counterstrike.
Starcraft II will have the same advantage that the Wii did by pulling in many adult gamers that spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing the original game. I concede the point that the first person shooter Genre has always had a larger user base than the real time strategy genre but I still think that perhaps there could be a lot of demand for the RTS genre that has been marginalized in recent years as things have moved towards MMOs and the more modern FPS games. It will be interesting to see how it plays out and how blizzard is able to leverage their huge (paying) user base to market the this new release.
Fair point (though those numbers only include Xbox360, PS3, and computer, not the myriad of mobile incarnations). There could be a lot of RTS players out there who have been quiet over the years, just waiting for this opportunity. But the same way the post brings up Street Fighter 4 (a non-FPS modern sequel to original old school game with "big" following) and it's ability to parley huge buzz and vocal fanbase into decent but not great sales, I have major doubts about how StarCraft II can stack up against the current industry standards of success. Even more so if they are alienating their core demographic by removing cherished multiplayer features.
Maybe this will find success not through the older generation that remembers the original, but instead by giving rise to a new generation of RTS players who never even knew what they were missing in this FPS and MMO dominated world.
Note: Sales data from Wikipedia, which has links to the original articles with the results.