After witnessing one of the most successful RPG releases in recent history, Diablo 4 seems to have lost all its viewership online. Being Blizzard’s highest-sold game ever, many expected the fourth installment in the Diablo 4 franchise to prosper, but instead, Diablo 3 has surpassed it suddenly.
On June 6, Diablo 4 was released worldwide as the game sold more than 10 million copies within 3 days of launch. This made it Blizzard’s highest-selling game of all time. However, it seems like the game continues to lose traction, losing more than 90% of its viewership since its June launch.
Rather Diablo 3 has surpassed its successor, even though it was released 11 years ago. With its new Season 29, Diablo 3 now sits at a weekly average of 3,000 viewers on Twitch with a peak of 5,600 viewers on September 17. For context, Diablo 4 has a weekly average of 940 viewers at the time of writing.
Diablo 4 saw a peak viewership of 940,000 at the time of its release, ten times more than Diablo 3 ever achieved. However, it has lost almost 99% of its peak viewership and sits at a weekly average of 940 on Twitch.
Something to keep in mind is that a new season of D3 has recently come out (more interest) while D4 hasn’t had anything in a while (less interest). These two things will be bumping the numbers.
P.S I’m a long time PoE and formerly D3player. I’m stoked I didn’t buy into D4. If anyone hasn’t tried it yet, a D4 YouTuber called Darth Microtransactions described PoE as ‘everything I wanted in D4 but more and free’.
Oh fuck, is PoE supposed to be free? I’ve spent like $1000 on it in the last 10 years in cosmetics, stash tabs, and character slots.
Realistically all you need to play the game is $50 in stash tabs and $500 in portal skins
And $100-$200 on foot print skins…
Haha money well spent supporting an independent studio from a little country at the bottom of the world made by a group of people who are legitimately passionate about the game!
Also just for fun $1k over 10 years = $100 a year. That’s not a bad amount imo! Also I’m guessing if you’ve spent that much money that you’ve spent an equally large amount of time playing!
I have thousands of hours in the game. It’s one of my all time favorites!
The other commenter is unfortunately (partially) right and PoE is owned by Tencent. I haven’t noticed any quality drop though, I still think they are making a great game. I definitely haven’t spent as much money on it in the last few years though
Yea it is but it’s still made in New Zealand, and personally I suspect it was a way for them to break into the Chinese market, especially as Tencent facilitate online gaming services. I don’t have any proof of that, it’s just something I’ve thought about.
Money well spent supporting a Chinese company that has ties to the Chinese government and known espionage.
GGG are a shell of what they were. Most of the key people have moved on to other studios.
Yep they’re owned by Tencent, however from what I’ve read, seen and experienced in game, Tencent don’t have much, if any, of an input on the development. Yes I know that Tencent staff sit on the board of GGG.
GGG did a rough patch a few years ago, I was out of the loop and not playing then, but it seems it’s made a fine comeback.
Lastly, if I’m not giving my money to a NZ company owned by Tencent (who I agree are very not cool), I’m most likely giving it to some equally bullshit, corrupt, money grabbing AAA developer in America so what’s the difference?
Path of Exile is garbage now. Chinese meddling made the game bad.
All I know is that I own both D3 and D4 (as well as others), and I’m not playing either.
I played through the story of D4, and started a seasonal character and everything and I just stopped playing.
My main gripe is that my character rarely feels powerful. With level scaling in D4, enemies are consistently at or above my level. I level up, and nothing changes, the enemies level up with me. I might as well not be leveling, just unlocking my more advanced abilities… the only time I feel the difference in power between me and my enemies is when they flatten me without effort. Then I realize they’re 3-5 levels above me, elite, and I’m like, oh yeah, that makes sense.
Basically, I’m almost never a higher level than my enemies. I’m always the same level or significantly lower level, so I have to be done kind of expert to dodge everything they throw at me and I’m just trying to play a dumb game.
I switched to something else where I can pick the difficulty, and I play on the easier modes, I’m not playing games to get clobbered all the time, I just want to kill some stuff, do the things that need doing and get my dopamine hit and move on. D4 is a constant struggle. It gives me anxiety.
I loved the server test. Totally hooked. Bought it on launch and after a week I was done.
After a few days it all seemed like a reskin with “retention” gimmicks and FOMO.
TBH after like a decade, and playing it for some 100h, it’s a weak offering for a studio of that magnitude. I often feel they spent more on marketing that making the thing.
After hearing what happened with Diablo Immortal I decided to wait a month before even considering it. Glad I did.
Honestly, getting that way about A LOT of games this year. I played Starfield on game pass, got my fix in about 8 hours, and haven’t played since.
Oh absolutely. Never pre-order games. At least wait a day to check user reviews and make sure it’s not immediately broken.
With maybe the notable exception of multiplayer games, all games will be at least just as good a year after launch as they are at launch day.
Add to it that in a year’s time there will be enough reviews out there from people who actually played it longer than 5h and the heavy marketing phase will be more than over so it’s actually possible to get a hype-free overview of it, AND the game itself will likely be better than at launch due to bug fixing in the meanwhile and maybe even some content added, and it’s the logical thing to never buy before or at launch and just wait.
However most people have problems with “reward delaying” (and actual psychological term for the ability to wait for something to be more ‘rewarding’ before going for it) and “just have to have it now!” and that just overrides logic (assuming they even took the time to think about it in the first place).
Smart. I fell for the hype on reddit & had serious buyers remorse.
I’m always flabbergasted that 100h of gameplay is considered a failure of a product.
When you weigh it against all the bullshit hoops games make you jump through these days, I’d say comparing 100h in Super Mario is a faaaaar cry from 100 h in a modern ARPG.
Almost the same, but at least i played it 150h before the first season.
Honestly, I’ve only ever spent over 100+ hours on a game I felt “meh” about once before that I can think of (it was Disgaea).
In any game with RPG elements like unlocks and numbers-going-up (and these days that’s all of them), it’s always worth asking yourself “am I really enjoying this, or am I just anticipating the next carrot it’s dangling in front of me”?
Like, I used to play Civ games way too much, and now I don’t because I realized that the actual fun parts of the game were kind of fleeting and most of it was about The Next Thing.
Oh i really enjoyed it. I’ll surely play more when they’ll fix all the things i dislike and improve some others. So in about 3 to 5 years xD
The beta was one of the most boring things I’ve ever played, what hooked you in from it?
Dark, brooding, ARPG from arguably the fathers of the genre.
What other games in the genre are you into? It just felt so lackluster to me, like even far behind PoE which is much older at this point.
It’s slim picking in the field, so mostly PoE these days. Probably my longest running game. But TBH, they are kinda on fumes too. New leagues have all been pretty meh. PoE looks great but it’s like 2 years out still (beta late next year).
There were a couple that showed promise but not sure if they ever materialized.
I’ve no interest in the Diablo series, but am I the only one who hates streaming as a measurement of success? It’s like the gaming media equivalent to when journalists report on Xitter hashtags… it’s just the easiest, dumbest metric available.
Probably because companies do their best to hide most metrics of purchases and players. Remember when some smart fella used the hyper accurate steam achievements to be able to derive how many people owned a game? Steam patched that out and now the best metric is based on number of review scores but that depends on the game, genre and score rating etc…
Diablo is on Battle.net, not steam. There’s no way to see player count, and viewer count does typically corelate to player counts. It’s not one-to-one, but it isn’t useless.
Glad I didn’t bother with the game
I still haven’t had the chance to play D4, but played a lot of D2 and some D3. Anyone here with some insight on what they fucked up with D4?
Endgame sucks.
Scaling content means there’s little power scaling variety, viable builds are very narrow so there’s not much build variety, the leveling curve is punishingly slow because they are trying to live service it, and seasons have lame rewards and boring features so far. Dungeon variety is nearly non-existent and poorly randomized with time wasting objective design.
Also it’s a Diablo game where none of the endgame content takes place in Hell.
TL;DR: Designing games as a live service means designing around time wasting and anti-player choices.
Damn, really disappointing to hear. I felt like D3 was ok but for some reason couldn’t quite match up to D2, and so was hoping that D4 would deliver. But now I know to at least adjust my expectations if/when I finally play.
The first playthrough is great. Open world is awesome.
Just don’t expect to get to level 100 and minmax your loot, as you’ll almost certainly drop off before then.
we are going to be sold Hell. guaranteed
and then they will sell us Heaven, and then they will sell us cow level, then they will sell us whimsyshire, then they will sell us…
Well compared to D2, the progression was reverse linear, you started off strong at Level 1, and cleared rooms and then you became weaker as you levelled up.
To maintain your strength, you needed to have the optimal gear in every slot (head, armor, gloves, boots, etc), and have an optimal spec.
The issue was that the items were egregiously generic, and were replaced pretty much on a constant basis, anything you picked up was pretty much an upgrade until Level 50, when “Sacred” and “Artifact” became a class, and your entire inventory was outdated.
Basically, the main issue was they began by making Diablo: Immortal, a mobile game and midway through development remembered it’s a PC game and not a mobile micro transaction machine, even though that’s in the game.
I’m a Diablo 1&2 Veteran, who has meleed Uber Diablo to death with a Fury Druid in 2022, soloed Diablo in 1996 with a Warrior, and I’ve never been more bored playing an ARPG than Diablo 4.
My best friend is a stoner, so he got far more value out of it. To be fair, he also gets a lot of value out of staring at walls, so there’s that.
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The game industry seems to have been heavily infected with capitalistic bullshit. It’s really sad to see what was once a fun combination of art, entertainment, nerdiness, and tech turn into another soulless cash machine.
The game industry has always been deeply entrenched in capitalism…
Look at the arcades of old. They were basically just slot machines for kids without the chance for a payout.
Were they fun? I have way more fun playing arcade games than I do most Blizzard games these days (and I have more money left after).
I’m not sure if they were or not. I wasn’t around during that time. I’m more commenting on this prevailing narrative that video games were this auteur-focused medium that’s just now being sullied by capitalism. That’s a false narrative and I think what’s really happening is that we’re becoming more and more aware of just how insidious unchecked capitalism can really be and we’re noticing it more and more in the things that we love. Whereas in the past, we may have been less critical or interrogative of the industry as a whole.
Agree to disagree I guess, I think it’s far worse and far more prevalent.
There’s tons of good indie games. And you don’t even need a 2000€ PC to play them.
I’m just sitting around playing Shattered Pixel Dungeon and, while id prefer something narrative driven, it’s been giving me the happies for quite a while.
The short and sweet answer is that it’s just not Diablo. It does not compare with any of the previous Diablo releases in the slightest. It might as well be a generic mobile game like immortal…
They forgot to make it fun.
In D2 finding gear felt fun. Runes were rare but powerful and sets/legendaries offered different build paths. You also had control over magic find with the ability to lower your power to increase magic find.
D3 (much later) expanded sets so that a number of builds were viable per class, making it fun to find any piece of gear. They also added rifts to challenge yourself to no end. The devs liked watching people push higher tiers and celebrated it.
D4 does not have runes or sets. Every legendary effect can to removed from the legendary and added to any yellow piece of gear. As a result, you’re typically chasing random yellow items for a .1% increase that all feels very samey until you find a unique. Currently, uniques are not even close to all being viable. Also blizz activity monitors unique drop rates and decreases them/bans people for finding ways to increase drop rates. The devs do not like people pushing harder stuff because that means they spending less time looking at the intentionally shitty (free) transmogs. They want you to grind away for days to get incremental success so you tire of your looks and buy skins and battle passes. If that explanation sucks, then I have no fucking idea what they’re doing. Maybe they expect us to grind because they don’t know how to create more content?
It’s just fucking boring and bland looking. It’s everything that sucked about 3 and then doubled down on the suck. I may be biased as fuck, but Path of Exile is infinitely more fun than D3 and 4 combined. I dumped hundreds of hours into D2 and then a bunch more into the remaster, but D3 felt like a chore and D4 couldn’t even hook me with the beta enough to buy the game.
I finished the campaign with my wife and we had fun do it together than after 90 hrs or so (we kept the screen a lot so I’m not sure its actually 90 hrs) I deleted it and went on, right when season 1 started. I tried to come back to it yesterday alone and it was just… Dull. The game was boring as hell playing alone, after 2 hours I deleted it again
Diablo 3 was incredibly boring to me, I played the beta for 4 and felt like they doubled down on everything that made 3 boring and uninteresting so I never looked back. I had a lot of fun with the remaster of 2, however. Blizzard, like almost all companies these days, is run by business majors who don’t care one iota about the products they’re making.
They kept nerfing the fun out of it
correction, they were feeding us medicine but forgot the sugar.
That implies they’re doing something good for us. This is like giving your friend a box of smokes and then offering them chewing gum to hit the nicotine fix. It didn’t help, but I guess I have some gum now.
this is litetally the analogy blizzard used.
Last few updates there’s only buff I think. Seems the nerf patch only happened before season 1
Being Blizzard’s highest-sold game ever
Do you guys not have phones? With an internet connection to read about the things Blizzard has been doing with their games recently?
How could d4 have possibly sold more copies than wow?
Path of Exile clones
Path of Exile aka “The real sequel to D2”
Titan Quest was pretty good, and I think it used all of the same sound effects.
Grim Dawn! Successor to TQ and measurably better than any other arpg on the market (in my opinion).
I didn’t enjoy how the “correct” way to play was to spend your points on stats instead of fun abilities.
Last Epoch scratches the ARPG itch for me and has a lot of customization (each skill has its own talent tree that can change how it behaves.)
I enjoyed Grim Dawn up until the last boss. I haven’t played any of the DLC though, it’s worth going back to it.
A new Expansion is in the works too! Crate Entertainment really cares about their game and it shows, not many games out there with that kind of long-term support
Everyone thinks they want to play the next new hit. We are not ready for it at all. We want consistency, something we know. We are not ready for anything new.We are too old. We as gamers should admit that to ourselves and the gaming industry should too.The next generation of gamers is in the starting blocks and is playing whatever they want. You should concentrate on those. But that’s the door for the small indie studios and not the big ones.McDonald’s recognized it decades ago: children are the customers of tomorrow.
