I am not gonna try to guess the numbers. But I do say that if the numbers are big enough we will hear about it during the Q3 quarterly update earnings call to investors. Otherwise we might not ever know what they are. I hope though that the numbers are high in order to have something to brag about.
I told myself something similar just yesterday…
What was the point of announcing D:I in 2018 when it’s not even out yet here in 2021 ?
What if they announced D:I alongside D4 in 2019 ? Man…
BTW, I took the opposite example of D:I beig announced in 2019 because I really believe that the only way of properly announcing a game like D4 is with a cinematic like they did. A cinematic that was surely not ready in 2018. I don’t think announcing the game with just a JPEG is a good thing to do. 
Blizzard north gained a ridiculous amount of trust with gamers. Activision took over and basically ruined the company. Now we hear of law suits an stuff. Just isn’t good. That trust is finally diminishing. Not gonna have as many people buying just to buy anymore.
My point is in the amount of time d3 has been out and the fact it spawned from the great d2. It should have had double those sales or more. D2 could have sold 100k copies to d3 30mil and it’s still infinitely better.
So I don’t think d2r will sell as many as it should.
I don’t think thats entirely true. I just think its caused A LOT more hesitancy with the gamers. So with D2R, despite its popularity, is most likely really suffering in the pre-order department. thats why they suddenly did the dumb “early access for pre order” despite it being a literal joke and 1 week before the open beta, making it pointless.
I suspect most people are now waiting for reviews and if they are bad… no buy. and because of recent mistakes with WC3R, TONS of players are hesitant to buy right now. Once the great reviews for D2R come out, then the numbers will sky rocket im sure.
Maybe if they make it free with a 1-year-sub to WoW like they did with D3 the numbers would even be comparable. And since there are less WoW players now than at the release of D3 the impact on sales would be lower.
For the sales figures of 30 million for D3, Blizzard did not include the copies that came with WoW if you purchased a year long subscription. At some point, Blizzard made that clear about their D3 sales figures.
I think we might get an idea about D2R sales with the third quarter ATVI investor call. If the numbers are good/worth bragging about then it will most likely be mentioned explicitly.
We shall see. Q3 ends on Sept 30th. The Nov Investor Call will discuss that, but I don’t know what data they will have at that point. Day one or week one sales would be it. Not sure they will go into that.
I am always curious of course.
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Blizzard will definitely know their PC sales numbers since you have to directly purchase D2R from them. For consoles, they will have more than a month to get the data from consoles which presumably gives Blizzard a set amount of money for each console D2R purchase.
Since D2R is digital only, they won’t need to worry about retail sales that have/have not been made.
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I can respect you acknowledging that, despite how much crap Micro and Blash take. I have tended not to pay too much attention to those threads, only chiming in here and there, so I have not seen many of the others experience in the Diablo-verse.
If the sales figures are terrific, Blizzard isn’t going to wait until the Q3 earnings call scheduled for early November to release the numbers. They’ll issue a press release with the numbers within a week to 10 days after launch.
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I think it will outsell the original.
You have a lot of original players with plenty of disopsable income these days who will likely pick it up just to see the reinvigorated look at minimum.
Many younger players with play it out of authentic interest.
And many younger players will pick it up because they change games every 10 minutes and will want to signal to twitter how they’re cool for picking up a 2 decade old game. You’ve seen what I’m talking about.
I’m more interested in long term numbers. I remember the old days of D2. When you couldn’t keep up with the chat. When the duplicated chat channels were in the dozens. When you saw a game name in the list, and then you could never find it again because the amount of game lobbies was insane. The same thing went for players.
I’ve played D2 through the years to present and it’s a small community on old bnet even when the ladder resets. Playing the game gets personal at that point, you see the same names all the time. It’s comfy but it’s a little too quiet.
I know it D2R will sell well, but the more important question is how many people will still be playing 6 months from release? 1 year from release? And how much time will they be sinking?
If it’s even 10% of say 4M sales, that would seem to me to be a win.
I agree. If D2R sold 5 million copies in the first two weeks, Blizzard would definitely be getting that information out there. It is simple business: “Hey look everyone we have made an incredibly popular game. If you haven’t purchased D2R yet, you should.”
We shall see. I honestly hope they get great release figures.
They did things right this time - all the major game changing topics have been made public so players can make informed and educated decisions on their purchase - or refund. Nothing is being hidden that will be a big shock to players once the game is released. That is the RIGHT way to do it. Let people buy things after fully understanding what they are getting (good and bad parts both).
- No TCP/IP
- Ultrawide support limited
- Char models
- No lobby/keyboard support for Console
- Switch is 4 player groups
- Shared stash, run over gold pickup, ability to compare items, item links can be used in chat, gambling refresh button, killing cow king no longer locks the portal, ladder runes available non-ladder, uber events available single player, etc.
- Original D2 (2000) and LoD (2001) are staying exactly as they are and available.
If any of those things is not acceptable, someone should not buy it, or should refund before release while they can.
I believe it will sell well too
D2R is available on all platforms so that’s a major plus. Will D2R be available in Asian markets on 9/23 too? That might affect the overall number depending on when they release their numbers.
I hope it sells like hell… 
Seriously, the better the numbers, the more maintenance dollars Blizz will invest in keeping the game updated. We all should be rooting for this - and STOP telling others to play something else if they even think about making a suggestion.
We need every player we can possibly get!
PC gaming wasn’t as big as console gaming back in the early 2000s.
D2 was never made for consoles until now.
South Korea and South East Asia, yes. Same as the usual “Asia” realm for D3 and other games.
China, I don’t think so. I don’t think D2 was ever officially released there and in order to run any game in China, it has to meet their cultural restrictions AND be run by a Chinese company. The game has way too much blood, bones, skeletons, etc. to be released there. They were also excluded from the Open Beta. Blizz has never mentioned anything at all about China and D2R.
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Over 1 million will play the 23rd easy. Beyond that, i’m not sure.