Blizzard earned $49m from Diablo Immortal’s first month, with 10m downloads to date
https://i.imgur.com/7pKLi1W.png
Diablo Immortal continues to make over $1 million a day despite fan backlash.
https://i.imgur.com/BURvijn.png
46% of the revenue was from the United States alone, and it hasn’t included with PC sales and SEA regions. 
What happened to the other 20+mil subs…
You mean from the same few hundred suckers, erm I mean whales. And when you divide revenue with # of downloads…that’s pretty BAD.
Interesting. It means the “average” amount spent per player is $4.99-ish. The cost of the Battlepass that grants the basic cosmetics and a few other little things.
Now, imagine if they had set a price on the game of maybe $25.00, with some cosmetic packages and such on top.
10M X $25 would have gotten them $250M instead of $49M with Seasonal passes for $5 a month for cosmetics which would continue the current average revenue stream.
I am not sure what subscriptions you are talking about. There were pre-registers for the game from people who expressed interest before release, but apparently of those 10M actually downloaded. They were not subscribed or committed people.
Diablo 3 sold 3.5 Million copies on the first day. How much money do you think that made for Blizzard? $50M is peanuts compared to that.
50M may sound like peanut money now but if they can keep that 50M/month rate steady, that’ll be more than half a billion in a year.
And the game hasn’t even been released yet in the main target zone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III
“Before its release, Diablo III broke several presale records and became the most pre-ordered PC game to date on Amazon.Activision Blizzard reported that Diablo III had broken the one-day PC sales records, accumulating over 3.5 million sales in the first 24 hours after release and over 6.3 million sales in its first week, including the 1.2 million people who obtained Diablo III through the World of Warcraft annual pass.”
That calculation will come down to content updates. Can they generate enough recurring revenue to eventually offset what they could have gotten as a one shot purchase.
First battle pass update is this week and many are waiting to see what drops.
Isn’t that hilariously low for a mobile game?
So with basic math and ratio with the downloads, this $49 million means for each download, someone bought a battle pass. Well, at least they achieved something. This is still low for a mobile game though.
D3 sold 3.5 million copies in 24hrs and based on a retail price of say $40 thats $140,000,000
OP can defend DI all he wants but its been a month and they havent come close to that
Exactly. If they can generate good content for a good price per Season that may be sustainable. $4.99 a month is pretty reasonable for entertainment. It is less than a lunch at a fast food stop. For people with disposable income that is quite affordable.
My worry is that the line between reasonable for fun gameplay and extras crosses into whale territory for what many consider competitive.
We shall see what they do.
For reference:
Call of Duty Mobile made around $15M in the first week. 18+months later, it made 1 billion.
This.
sadly it will NOT be pleasent after all Blizzard has a tendency to find a way to make a bad situation worse despite the amount of feedback by people telling them to step back and think carefully about it
after all how many times have they said stuff like “wait and see” “working as intended” and the ever popular “pull the ripcord”
every one of those ended up making things even worse shortly after being said
Doesn’t matter how much money it makes. The game still sucks and blizzard is still awful for making it.
Casinos and drug dealers make a lot of money too and you don’t see too many people praising their “success”.
EA Games “no gaming developer could ever possibly turn out a game so bad it would manage to annoy and drive away their own playerbase as quickly as we did”
Blizzard “Hold my beer”
Finally some updated sales numbers.
Damn, wasnt it already 10M after 2 weeks? Not even 1 million downloads since. That is crazy, if true.
Indeed.
Of course, they would not have had all those 10M sales at $25. On the other hand, some people who didnt download D:I now because it was F2P P2W might have got it for $25. Still, likely less than the 10M.
While ½ billion in a year is definitely a success, it would still lag behind D3 then.
Usually, one would also expect sales to slow down. Of course, when it releases in SE Asia, and especially China, there will be another jump.
The comparison is not that easy 1:1 in any case. To generate the recurring revenue you need constant content updates. Those cost money. D3 manages to make its money in a somewhat low maintenance mode. We wont ever truly know the expenses for Blizzard to make D:I content, and thus we cant compare the two. But still, $1 billion revenue for D3 is likely better than $1 billion revenue for D:I all else being equal (now, to be fair, all else isnt equal, I assume D:I was a lot cheaper to make, especially since it reuses a bunch of D3 stuff).
It is likely in the very high end compared to ALL mobile games.
But for D:I, arguably one of the highest profile mobile game releases ever, yes, it seems fairly low. That is a release who one would expect to keep up with, or beat, the top mobile earners.
Btw, CoD Mobile seemingly had over 100M downloads in its first month. To be fair, D:I probably wasnt expected to compete with that.
It sounds like CoD mobile was at around $50M in its first month too, so here they are more equal. The discrepancy between downloads and revenue likely underscores how predatory P2W D:I is, generating a lot more money from the top whales.
Sure but we can also say with high confidence that most of those 10M did not buy a battle pass. I wouldn’t be surprised if way less than 1M bought a battle pass.
This is also true. A bad game does not become less bad because it is profitable.
Still, it does matter how much money it makes. If it becomes a financial success, it increases the odds of Blizzard making more games like it.
https://www.eurogamer.net/18-european-countries-call-for-better-regulation-of-loot-boxes-following-new-report
the support to stop this kind of predatory marketing is growing stronger it was just 2 countires in the begining
Well, the current Battle Pass season ends on Thursday morning at 03:00, so we’ll see what Season 2 has in it’s Battle Pass soon enough.
By the way, there appears to be a corresponding downtime on Wednesday morning, presumably to patch in the changes ready for Thursday’s BP season change. It’s nice to see an in-game countdown for this, so that players can easily see when it’ll happen rather than having to work out offsets from UTC / CEST…
Ah, the source actually goes into some more details on the downloads
I dont know how other mobile games compare. But that slowdown does seem really significant.
This is also quite interesting. Some slowdown in revenue, but not that much. To be fair, one might assume an increase in revenue over time early on, as more people hit the “soft pay walls”.
https://mobilegamer.biz/blizzard-earned-49m-from-diablo-immortals-first-month-with-10m-downloads-to-date/
Interesting comparison
Just for a little context, these first month figures are way ahead of another big-name IP that came to mobile recently. As we reported a few weeks back, Apex Legends Mobile’s first month earned EA $11.6m from 21.8m downloads, according to Appmagic.
However, it also sounds like Apex Legends does not have any direct P2W elements (it sells heroes, which theoretically can be P2W, but since it is a shooter, I pretty much assume it isn’t), so it makes sense that the spending is way less per player. Of course, to compensate, you need more players, which so far it hasn’t managed.
D3 on release was $60 not $40…
It’s finally happened, after years of nail-biting and speculation — Diablo III arrives on May 15 pretty much worldwide for Windows and Mac-based computers. The price: $60.
Source:
https://techland.time.com/2012/03/15/diablo-iii-gets-a-release-date-you-can-go-to-hell-on-may-15/