So in quick words:
Can we say that Blizz needs to make a 180º change in 2025?
Fingers crossed, the silence says it all.
I mean D4 made its money really. I don’t know what the sales of VoH were but the fact it was on sale multiple times with multiple free SB trials I’d say not as well as they’d have hoped.
I think like any studio they’ll continue to work on their project with their plans and definitely take note of other games and how well they’re doing. I’m pretty sure most D4 players do NOT want to go through a lengthy campaign twice to get to the endgame unless something has changed. So for the most part the design and direction that Diablo is going in is pretty different from other games already.
So in the end wake up call seems a bit steep. If anything all Blizz has to do is play it cool and continue to add things and improve based on feedback and keep going with their own plans. Who knows they might have some awesome content and ideas coming up no one knows about.
We’ll see what happens. I wouldn’t say it was a huge wake up call for Blizzard. The games you’ve mentioned, while having a decent player base, are still smaller in scope comparatively. Now this doesn’t mean that many people are playing D4 currently, but people also forget just how popular Blizzard games are worldwide, and the Asian servers have a very healthy population of players.
Again this isn’t in defense of Blizzard, they absolutely need to step up their game, but let’s look at things realistically here. Updates will be slow to come out for D4. I’m going to bet S8 will just be number tweaks and a seasonal gimmick, same for S9. 10 may add something new, but I’m skeptical here.
IF, and it’s a big IF right now, they do have another expansion planned and in the works, it’ll be when see the most added content. Which if VoH is anything to go off of, it may feel just as lackluster with certain new systems.
While I want the game to succeed to and pump out more content, expansions, etc. I’m not going to lose any sleep if we don’t get a new expansion and the game slowly dies off. I’ll play it for as long as it holds my interest then I’ll move on.
Probably not, but at least for my self I have no incentive to even give D4 another go until they actually do something with real end game content.
They needed to change a long time ago and didn’t do that…Not gonna lie, they won’t really change anything unless it brings them money. And unless they lose money they won’t change nothing…
As my great great last programming boss said, if it works leave it like that.
They can only do 360º changes… Not 359º, nor 1º… 360º
I am just speculating but I also have the impression that VoH didn’t bring a significant boost to the game for Blizzard to want to invest a lot more in D4. We are already at season 7, I still expect most players to come back when it starts, but they will probably be leaving earlier than before.
If VoH was really disappointing in terms of sales and player retention, I don’t see Blizzard providing significant content in any future season because the result will probably be the same.
As long as the sorcerer remains worthless class of the game… no more diablo 4 for me and no more battlepass or sorcerer skins.
I’m VERY happy playing POE2 with chrono-sorcerer and no more need to be carried. I feel happy and powerful, and that is priceless
wait, can you explain again how you got access to their metrics?
anyway… if one would try to take your thread serious…
why would blizzard need to do a 180? just by sales, we can -assume- microsoft is pretty happy.
Im sorry you feel like a big investor, whos still dissatisfied with d4.
so you arent playing end tier stuff? chrono is like C-Tier i think? ah, nevermind, you are playing the worse stormweaver.
I said steam, also you can see on XBOX how the game is popular, same on twitch based on metrics if its being watched or not.
And the numbers are low there, and I dont think BNET has 3 trillions of players on their games.
got you buddy.
you are basically saying you got no clue.
Fair enough.
Btw. Poe2 - a new game, lost 50% of its playerbase within a month. What do you suggest they should do to safe that doomed game?
It has 256k only on steam atm, what you taliking about xDDDDD
D4 has 6k
Who is doomed?
poe2 lost 50% of its playerbase then indeed in its first month.
Damn, bad game. d4 is going to kill poe2 on the 21th January.
- 216,525 players right now
- 256,285 24-hour peak
- 578,569 all time peak last month
I think that is what he’s talking about in terms of losing 50% of its player base. I could be wrong though. I mean if people are going to use numbers they have to be accurate and give the full context.
What kind of nonsense are you spouting here?
Steam is not at all an indicator of Blizzard’s player numbers… at most people who have no idea whatsoever claim that…
Just completely ignore the consoles and WoW… which had a pretty big hype due to the new Classic servers.
If you’re going to try and put up any stats, at least make a little effort…so minimally at least.
It didnt, on weekends reaches almost 400k. Also D3 lost more than that in a month and specially after the disaster of the 1st season nerfs. As someone said before VoH being on sale so soon its a possible indicator that the expansion/DLC underperformed.
Would still need accurate numbers from Blizzard, which no one has but them. Also to be fair to PoE 2, they are currently on three different platforms. Their own, Steam, and Epic. So even the numbers from Steam are off as well.
However the bigger factor here is the fact D4 started out only being available to console and PC. It came out on Steam much later to a much smaller audience at the time. Yes the dwindling numbers can represent player retention to an extent, but we don’t have the full scope.
Saying it has 6k on Steam doesn’t mean anything in the grand scope of the population. That would be like saying those of us on the forum represent the entirety of the player base.
Everything must be taken into context and have accurate data to show for itself. Otherwise your argument is just they have higher numbers on Steam. Which is great if that’s all you’re trying to prove.
Neither of us can say with certainty how many players are in each game at peak times. Poe 2 you can get a better estimate, but it still doesn’t paint the whole picture. D4 is even worse in this regard.
If S7 has very low uptake, I think that will be a clear signal about the appetite for games with a bit more depth and difficulty. But other than seeing their own players not return, I don’t there’s a reason for the D4 devs to think much has changed. They knew POE2 was coming out, they knew a segment of the population was going to play it, and they knew that it was going to have more complexity, more depth, and more difficulty.
Honestly, I still think D4 does a lot of things better than POE2, and there are some relatively simple ways that they could improve the endgame loop to compete, even without adding an infinite Atlas (though that is a great idea). I suspect we will see the D4 devs grabbing some ideas from it like they did with LE. But aside from shiny newness and brutal difficulty, I don’t think there’s as big a gap as people were anticipating. There are tons of issues with itemization in POE2 right now, D4 crafting might actually be better right now, and the POE2 endgame is so punishing that it will never appeal to most D4 players. If I had to pick a base game to iterate on, I’d pick POE2, but I D4 isn’t as far behind as I’d expected.
I agree, if both games had released at the same time, in the states they did, D4 would be the obvious loser here. Now that doesn’t mean PoE 2 would inherit the entirety of the D4 player base mind you, just as it hasn’t done so today. There’s some overlap, and there are people who would prefer one over the other, but if I had to guess I would say the majority that didn’t want to play D4, probably wouldn’t be that interested in PoE 2 either.
In the state that D4 came out, assuming PoE 2 came out at the same time, you’d be trading one grind over the other, except one is arguably more difficult and un-user friendly with a crafting system and maps, where the other just had nothing but Nightmare Dungeons.