Anno 1602 ultimately became the German market's best-selling computer game of 1998. At the 1999 Milia festival in Cannes, it took home a "Gold" prize for revenues above €15 million in the European Union during the previous year. The high sales of Anno 1602 in German-speaking countries derived partly from Sunflowers' copy protection scheme, according to PC Games. Although the game launched as a direct competitor of StarCraft, it significantly outsold that title in the region by the end of 1998, despite the latter's success worldwide. Petra Maueröder reported that, because StarCraft had shipped without copy protection in Germany, its piracy rate there reached nine illegal copies for every legal version sold. Conversely, Sunflowers attempted to combat pirates by making Anno 1602 "one of the first games" printed on extended-capacity CD-ROMs, a writer for PC Games noted. These exceeded the storage limits of standard discs, which made Anno 1602 incompatible with most consumer CD-Rs and burners of the time. The effort resulted in faulty disc shipments, a common issue for extended-capacity CDs, but was ultimately judged by PC Games as "a complete success, despite the availability of cracks". Later years Anno 1602 became one of the construction and management simulations that "dominated the German sales charts for years", according to Der Spiegels Frank Patalong. By the end of January 1999, it had spent 38 weeks on Media Control's bestsellers list, ranking fourth that month. It soon became the first computer game to earn the VUD's "Double-Platinum" award, for 400,000 sales in German-speaking countries. By May, Anno 1602 had sold through 600,000 units in the German market and—together with its expansion pack New Islands, New Adventures—one million copies across Europe. PC Games declared it the German-speaking world's most successful computer title from April 1998–July 1999, and, as of September, the region's biggest computer game hit of all time. It continued to appear in Media Control's sales rankings through the latter half of September 1999, when it charted in 26th place and secured its 70th consecutive week in the top rankings. Sales surpassed 650,000 units by October; New Islands had sold above 200,000 units by that date. In the second part of October 1999, Anno 1602: Königs-Edition debuted at #4 on Media Control's charts. Announced in August for a fall launch, the SKU bundled Anno 1602 and New Islands with unique bonus missions. The new version had spent 10 weeks in the