So my brother(who absolutely hates this series)runs a game store. We had a conversation last night about the game and some verbal jabs were thrown back and forth and eventually he confided in me that he had sold nearly double the amount of copies of D4 these last few days than he had preorders on it.
That’s insane to me. I dunno if the negative feedback is backfiring or if with all the faults people are still enjoying it. Maybe a lot of the drama is just trolling. I don’t know.
Well if the game is selling like hotcakes let’s hope they are also going to dish out mega content for it.
Because these forums are just an echo chamber for people complaining. So it gives a totally biased view on how people actually feel about the game.
Most people who are playing and enjoying the game won’t come near these forums, ever.
People still buy physical copies?
I’m not the one who’s so far away.
When I feel the snakebite enter my veins.
Never do I wanna be here again
And I don’t remember why I came.
I’m all for good news on these forums, but I feel like we’re being had.
Game store? People buying physical copies of the game? It all sounds far-fetched to me.
The word of mouth effect.
D4 is an absolutely stellar game for the 40-50h of (casual) gameplay.
The current forum hate is aimed at the post-game, more specifically after lvl 60.
I mean I bought a digital and a physical myself. So there could be THOSE shenanigans for sure.
So you wanted a single player game? News flash that is not an aRPG. This is the problem is casuals like yourself want something so dumb and basic it hurts.
Selling lots of copies doesn’t mean that the game is successful (at least part of it), it just means marketing and hype did their thing.
The problem is that the game must be self-sustainable in terms of gameplay and replayability in time, or people will drop it as fast as they get it.
personally i do for games i love.
and trust me , if D4 had a physical edition (the collector isn’t a physical edition since it doesn’t have any game box in it , just goodies) : i would have purchased it (though i still took the collector box even if it’s not a collector edition)
i have a diablo atlar in my room with goodies, diablo 1 and diablo hellfire in big box edition, diablo 2 too in multiple edition , diablo 3 in both CE , some diablo figures, DVds , a big treasure golbin figure, magazine etc… 
(yea a bit too much maybe)
there’s very few game i do that for, but diablo i do.
What equals success in the retail market if not sales?
Casual players or people who have normal lives don’t go to the forums. Majority of players are casuals and spends like 2-3 hrs a day to play this game.
Some of us here in the forums really wants the game to be great and not all of our complains are invalid.
The problems with the game don’t really start until later in the game. The majority of the community hasn’t even finished the story let alone started grinding paragon… let alone reached 70+…
So with the vast majority of players that just hop on and play the game and are detached from all the forums… will be enjoying it. At least until they finally hit the later stages of the game.
Have you ever thought about why people would pre-order from a game store instead of from blizz? Maybe that’s why he sold more copies in store?
Sales have absolutely NOTHING to do with how good the game is. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. It has to do with:
1: Marketing. How many influencers are playing, what are critics saying, what’s the word of mouth?
2: How good previous games by the company were. In general, Blizzard made a lot of good games in the past.
How can you say that the sales are good because the game is good? People can’t even try the game until they pay for it. Your argument would have merit if the game was free-to-play and the sales were purely microtransactions because those microtransactions reflect people wanting to support a game after they’ve played it.
I bought the game because the beta was very good and am severely disappointed. The $90 I spent does not mean I think the game is good, it means I had hope that it would be good.
Erm, I’ve got over 100h myself… I was just speaking in general terms.
Like it or not, the release version of D4 was NOT designed for you and me, but for them.
The content for us is coming next.
You didnt want the cool candle for 100? 
Make stuff up much?
Post believability: 0%
Retail market success is one thing, you just sell copies and that’s that you don’t keep tracking things and plan for the future, but the game being successful business-wise is completely different.
Take a look at the most failed games, they sold millions Anthem for example, but then the game died because of the shallow content and bad coding. From a business perspective that had shareholders and a big timeline of content and mtx behind was a failure and it will not bring the money they forecast it would.