D3 reached 65 million sold units until May 2022: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo3/23788296/diablo-iii-celebrates-10-years
Nobody knows the exact purchase numbers of D4.
TLDR: Will D4 be more monetary successful than D3, that we’ll never get all the good things back that led to 65 mio purchasers and what I love, or will they make D4 more like D3? Or bring sth like D3R?
That’s actually surprising to me, by the way. Why doesn’t Blizz say something like if sales continue like this, they will have reached D3’s 30 million sales by the end of this year, making D4 the most successful Diablo? They always just name the hours played. That gives a deep insight.
I would spend 100 € for a D3R (do not make it darker, bloodier, and more brutal!!!) and 70 € for another D3/D3R expansion. I think I’m not the only one of the at least 30 Mio. purchasers of D3 who loves the game, and D4 isn’t at all for me.
I still play Diablo 3 because I really like everything, except there is no new content (maybe something in S29), and the paragons are not capped at 2500 or so. I prefer the comic style and the graphical setting and that it doesn’t look that realistic. It has a great story, not too brutal and bloody sequences (D1 and D2 weren’t for me), fast combat, the sets (even if there should be more to make more abilities viable), Rifts, Bounties, Greater Rifts, could go on all day. As a fun casual noob like I am, even with 1-2 hours a day, you can accomplish a lot in the game, feel strong like a hero and participate in all the content.
Please transfer the complete altar from S28 to the main game! I find the power creep perfect for noobs! Managed a GR 150 for the 1st time (S28 EU SSF HC Met Cold Wiz Para 1700). Getting into the leaderboards with few gons is an incentive. I always try to get my 8-16 gons every day for month during a season and reach my own goals with it. I would now like to get Firebird EB to GR145+ and GoD DH to GR 138+ before S29. It will be challenging, but that motivates me.
Edit 1: Updated D3 numbers and added a new source.
Edit 2: Added TLDR with a description of my intention behind the post.
D3 10th year anniversary stated that D3 sold 65 millions+. Just letting you know.
And for your question, I think D4 has a higher chance to be more successful than D3 due to in-game cash shop and battle pass… unless all D4 players don’t buy anything from D4 shop and D4 battle pass, which i highly doubt it.
We will be getting more successful story from D4 in the future. I will be more surprised if we don’t.
That is reached over the course of 3 years since release. D3 released in '12, pre-orders were available back at last quarter of '11 and reported to hit 30 Million copies sold in '15, that is 4 years roughly. D4 just released a few weeks ago in 2023, pre-orders were available in December '22 and sold about 5-8 million until today. That is merely a half year worth of sale score, I’d say it’s not bad.
That depends on how you measure success. Not everyone measures success in dollars. There are games that have generated far more revenue than others but “lost” to those others when awards were given.
D4 isn’t a bad game (in my opinion) and I’m sure it will gross more money than TotK due to microtransfoolsions but TotK will blaze trails.
I sure hope so because the story so far, is one of the games weakest points.
Halt, wanderer. A valid Diablo IV PC key linked to your Battle.net account is required to post in this category.
I won a key for the closed beta weekend and played on the open beta weekend. I’ll not buy it. I saw that’s not a game for me at all as a hardcore D3 fan.
As far as I know, D3 was only available on PC first, D4 on PC, and the consoles directly. So more purchases were possible in the early stage for D4.
I think, I didn’t stated here, that D4 is a bad game. It’s not a game for me, but millions of people like it. I wish them a lot of fun and luck in game! I’m asking a question. I summarized what I like in D3 (right forum) and that I want to have like an expansion for D3 or a D3R. The title only allows 60 chars.
The selling company does, and financial success is like priority one. If D3 had the most success, they maybe change D4 to be more like D3 or D5. Then I’ll buy both, perhaps.
Because that can easily be taken as a fail if they don’t reach those numbers. “Blizzard failed to reach the projected result” or something along those lines.
Not really though, they have been very stingy with hard numbers for a very long time now across all their games.
As for the title, yeah, from a pure monetary standpoint I expect D4 will outperform D3.
Your thread most likely won’t get deleted because your discussion is related to D3 and D4 at the same time. It would be silly if they remove any thread that makes a comparison between multiple games.
Only threads strictly about D4 will be removed as far as I have seen so far.
The sooner folks realize Blizz wants to pretend D3 never happened, the sooner a lot of D4 choices will make more sense. It’s not the same as learning from whatever mistakes they derived from the game, but instead willfully repeating them through the D2 scope and its own burdens. Plus the ills of modern gaming monetization.
I get the same feeling when I looked at D4 during the beta and now from an “outsider” perspective. It just looks like they are completely ignoring what they did with D3 over the last 10 years and in the process they are making the same mistakes again which they did in D3 vanilla or they even added new bad design decisions.
From what I’ve heard their thought process also was that doing renown again at the start of a new season would be “great content” and no one apparently went through this stuff two or three times to notice that it becomes boring and tedious? How does this kind of design decision even go live? Either criticism was completely ignored by the lead designers and managers which means they honestly suck at their job or there was no criticism internally to begin with which means either no one played through this stuff in internal tests properly or the testers just suck at their job.
I have no other explanations for that.
Regarding the sales numbers for D3 and D4 the question will be whether D4 will be able to continue with good sales numbers. I think the initial sales were extremely high due to advertisement campaigns being pretty effective. However it looks at the moment like the honeymoon phase is over and more and more people are losing interest fast. People losing interest in D4 also means word of mouth will not generate as many sales in the future. You could compare it to Star Wars Episode 8 where initially the box office was really good but dropped fast after word got out about the contents of that movie not being very good.
Obviously I can only speculate regarding D4 performance and whether it will outsell D3 in the end in the long run. In the first few weeks D4 definitely had a better run in terms of sales compared to D3. I think season 1 of D4 will decide where it will go in the long run and whether more people will want to buy or not. If to many people quit out of having to do renown again then this will be a major problem for Blizzard. This could be on the same level as the problems they faced back in D3 vanilla with inferno and the bad item drops. Even with RoS D3 never really regained attention from most players that quit in Vanilla D3.
To this day I still see claims in other ARPG forums about D3 that are either extremely outdated or false to begin with (each class supposedly only having one viable build for example)
My stance has pretty much been that D4’s first major patch will set the tone for its future success. As of now, the hotfixes haven’t painted the best picture and my simplified commentary there will just be “balancing the fun out of the game” when it comes to the usual Blizzard reactionary overreaction that never benefits players.
But yes, the Renown issue is certainly… something. I’d almost liken it to WoW forcing everyone to make a new character whenever a new raid tier comes out. I’ve never been a fan of seasons for multiple reasons, but sometimes you’ve just gotta acknowledge there’s grind for the sake of grind and all it adds is fruitless time sink.
“What were they thinking?!” almost seems too common in game development, but much like the idea of trying to forget D3, there’s probably a case of people who aren’t gamers or seasoned developers calling the shots with such a bonehead demand. Those that insist it’s all about continued exposure to the in-game shop over time aren’t really off the mark. The fact gaming is even where it’s at today is a testament that there aren’t enough players with the willpower to say no. So the cycle deepens.
Or you know, players actually like the product so they spend money on it? Seeing that Blizzard made closer to 6 billion dollars on MTX last year seem to indicate large swats of the player base are just fine with it.
Okay, now ask those same buyers if they’d be okay if they could simply earn it in-game instead. It’s a safe bet most would prefer to not have spent the money.
This stuff is tried, tested psychological manipulation. Even if it’s “just cosmetics” in the end. The choice of either having something in the shop you want or don’t isn’t much of one. That feeling of want is exactly where the test of willpower begins.
Just because a large subsection of players are fine with throwing their money at garbage, doesn’t make it a good thing.
Millions of people throw their money away on gambling but you don’t hear many people praising the merits of casinos and sports betting sites () and their business models.
Greedy game companies with excessive and even sometimes manipulative and predatory monetization should be no different.
You would be right if it was just me criticizing the renown system. However it’s not just me. Due to the fact that I’m actually still considering buying D4 when S1 comes out I’m actively monitoring D4 Reddit and Youtube as well and there have been an increasing number of videos and posts mentioning and criticizing the renown system almost the same way I did back in March.
It’s fine doing it once (see collecting stuff in Lost Ark as well for example)
It’s terrible when having to do it repeatedly.
The criticism is very consistent. You can find examples on Youtube like this one here (for spacing reasons I just post video IDs):
/watch?v=jg8pI6DmCPM
Or this:
/watch?v=HQq9huZmm04
Also look at the highest comment below the second video:
“I think if the Devs go ahead with forcing people to re grind renown it will kill the game, people will grow bored very quickly and move onto something else or just outright quit at the prospect”
The D3 seasons worked because the tasks you had to complete for the season journey were pretty straight forward and not that time consuming to complete. Just completing the renown for all D4 acts is already a much higher time investment (and not a challenging one on a gameplay level) than all D3 season tasks together. But at the same the renown has an impact on the power levels of the character which makes completing it mandatory.
In D3 the seasonal tasks initially where to get the “free” set for your character and then it was just cosmetics and you could completely ignore it while going to the leaderboard rankings. In D4 if the seasons will have something like a leaderboard then you will have to complete renown or be left in the dust.
) and their business models.