State of the console game

Console Discussion
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Season 29 stats were taken about 3 months into the season. Season 30 stats were taken today.

Unlike the PC version, the console version allows you to see the entire leaderboard. And you can see how many people touched the season, as long as they’re on the Achievement leaderboard, which only requires gaining 10 levels.

Season 29:
Xbox: 298,166
PlayStation: 296,091

Season 30:
Xbox: 58,746
PlayStation: 87,552

(I didn’t take stats on the Switch, so I can’t tell you how many players played season 29, but I’d assume it would be a similar ratio).

For Season 29, the PlayStation did end up having 20k more players than the Xbox by season end, but I can only go off of numbers I have an actual recording of, not just what my memory is. And the PlayStation was captured a week earlier than the Xbox.

Also, take into consideration that Season 29, we had the Paragon Cap. This was what the hardcore players were stating was going to be “the worst season ever!”. This is why you can’t judge the real impact of a paragon cap, because at this state, every season is going to have fewer players than the previous season.

Just by the actual stats alone, you could make an argument that most people want a paragon cap, despite what people state on the forums, reddit, etc., but I doubt this would be true, if you could actually get apples to apples comparison.

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It is apples to oranges with S29 and S30. S29 was the ending of eras with new Seasonal Themes, while S30 is the start of going green with recycled themes. The numbers also don’t take factor in average play time per account, which could be significantly more/less than other seasons.

Totally agree and has been going on for a while. Would be interesting to see numbers from S20-S29 to see which seasons had a predictable trend down and which did much worse or better than what the trend was showing.

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Like the above poster, it would be nice to see the numbers since S20 for curiosity sake.

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Unfortunately, I only have a cap of Season 27 for the PlayStation, and it’s roughly around the Season 29 numbers. And that’s what I’ve basically remembered. The PS typically hovered between 280-320k, and the Xbox 250-280k. But I only have memory on this, so couldn’t prove it one way or the other.

The main thing is just the huge drop off this season.

Unfortunately, the console versions don’t allow you to view prior seasons, although there have been bugs before which have mistakenly shown prior season leaderboards. But the only way to find out is if someone happens to have a video of the achievement leaderboards, with someone on their friend’s list with 10 achievement points.

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The reason for the drastic decline probably has little to do with the cap but much more with the surrounding circumstances.

Blizzard promised Altar and Visions for non seasonal play and then didn’t deliver. Classic bait and switch. Some players like myself were so upset about this, that we didn’t touch S30 at all.
Not everyone is fond of completing the altar every season again.

Furthermore there were no new legendaries or builds introduced, while even S29 had some new builds like pony sader and chicken WD.

Also during S29 streamers announced a huge rebalance for S30 which generated some hype and incentivised players to push S29 for them to generate data to rebalance around.

The final rebalancing then ignored nearly all the feedback which dissappointed many players, being the last rebalance ever.

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6

Ya, I figured that was going to happen. Retention rate was going to be very down because of many factors:

the game is only getting older
no new theme
no new cosmetics

The cosmetics hurts retention in many ways. Non-season players would play just to get the cosmetics. Some seasonal players show up opening week only to unlock the new cosmetics. A lot of players who have multiple accounts across PC and console now do not need to play both to unlock cosmetics and can focus on one platform or the other.

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Well, this is the most scientific estimate that I’ve seen. This is definitely better than how I was trying to estimate player numbers. Good job!

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8

I think D4, D2R and modded gear inside seasons all impact D3 on console.

With no new patches ever coming with content I expect D3 on console to reduce in numbers each season from now.

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9

The Switch actually had 101k players this season, leading all the consoles. In previous seasons, the Switch was roughly around Xbox numbers, and it’s by far the most corrupted in terms of cheating.

I guess you could always say that Alexismad is correct, in that the Switch version came out Nov 2018 (Season 16) vs the other consoles, which started with Season 10, so they still have a few seasons to make up.

D4 & D2R though were out during Season 29, but it was a brand new theme.

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Thanks for providing these numbers BehindTimes. Would also be interesting to see how the trends vary across different regions.

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