After witnessing one of the most successful RPG releases in recent history, Diablo 4 seems to have lost all its viewership online. Being Blizzard’s highest-sold game ever, many expected the fourth installment in the Diablo 4 franchise to prosper, but instead, Diablo 3 has surpassed it suddenly.
On June 6, Diablo 4 was released worldwide as the game sold more than 10 million copies within 3 days of launch. This made it Blizzard’s highest-selling game of all time. However, it seems like the game continues to lose traction, losing more than 90% of its viewership since its June launch.
Rather Diablo 3 has surpassed its successor, even though it was released 11 years ago. With its new Season 29, Diablo 3 now sits at a weekly average of 3,000 viewers on Twitch with a peak of 5,600 viewers on September 17. For context, Diablo 4 has a weekly average of 940 viewers at the time of writing.
Diablo 4 saw a peak viewership of 940,000 at the time of its release, ten times more than Diablo 3 ever achieved. However, it has lost almost 99% of its peak viewership and sits at a weekly average of 940 on Twitch.
I still haven’t had the chance to play D4, but played a lot of D2 and some D3. Anyone here with some insight on what they fucked up with D4?
Endgame sucks.
Scaling content means there’s little power scaling variety, viable builds are very narrow so there’s not much build variety, the leveling curve is punishingly slow because they are trying to live service it, and seasons have lame rewards and boring features so far. Dungeon variety is nearly non-existent and poorly randomized with time wasting objective design.
Also it’s a Diablo game where none of the endgame content takes place in Hell.
TL;DR: Designing games as a live service means designing around time wasting and anti-player choices.
Agreed. It’s a solid game that just gets boring. I enjoyed the campaign and the co-op play. I liked the variety of play of the classes.
But since the launch they’ve just made the game boring. The first big patch just nerfed every build. It’s not a competitive game - they just decided you should have less fun I guess.
Gems are super boring - instead of being excited for them to drop, inactively ignore them. And the first seasons only mechanic is… fancy gems.
The towns are designed to make you run around a ton. The mount mechanics are actively hostile (maps have areas where you need to dismount to progress, then there’s a 10s cool down before you can mount again). Inventory management kinda sucks. The whole loot management part of the game is kinda flat and that’s a major component of this series.
It’s weird because this was the smoothest launch of a Diablo and the game felt feature rich as you leveled. But the end game is so fucking boring. They have so many things in D3 they could have just copied but instead we’ll end up with yet another patch of nerfs in a single player game.
What’s a live service?
Basically a game that is designed to receive regular content updates and have revolving meta elements. It’s a game that is designed to not have an end.
Thanks for the explanation.
Damn, really disappointing to hear. I felt like D3 was ok but for some reason couldn’t quite match up to D2, and so was hoping that D4 would deliver. But now I know to at least adjust my expectations if/when I finally play.
we are going to be sold Hell. guaranteed
and then they will sell us Heaven, and then they will sell us cow level, then they will sell us whimsyshire, then they will sell us…
Well compared to D2, the progression was reverse linear, you started off strong at Level 1, and cleared rooms and then you became weaker as you levelled up.
To maintain your strength, you needed to have the optimal gear in every slot (head, armor, gloves, boots, etc), and have an optimal spec.
The issue was that the items were egregiously generic, and were replaced pretty much on a constant basis, anything you picked up was an upgrade until Level 50, when “Sacred” and “Artifact” became a class, and your entire inventory was outdated.
The main issue was they began by making Diablo: Immortal, a mobile game and midway through development remembered it’s a PC game and not a mobile micro transaction machine, and kept the MT shop in the game regardless (which retails for $100, mind you)
I’m a Diablo 1&2 Veteran, who has meleed Uber Diablo to death with a Fury Druid in 2022, soloed Diablo in 1996 with a Warrior, and I’ve never been more bored playing an ARPG than Diablo 4.
My best friend is a stoner, so he got far more value out of it. To be fair, he also gets a lot of value out of staring at walls, so there’s that.
Hey man there’s some pretty god damned interesting walls out there.
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The game industry seems to have been heavily infected with capitalistic bullshit. It’s really sad to see what was once a fun combination of art, entertainment, nerdiness, and tech turn into another soulless cash machine.
The game industry has always been deeply entrenched in capitalism…
Look at the arcades of old. They were basically just slot machines for kids without the chance for a payout.
There’s tons of good indie games. And you don’t even need a 2000€ PC to play them.
From my time playing it, the looting wasn’t satisfying nor was the combat. In looting, the drop rate of things good or useful for your class seemed too low. For combat, it kinda felt like there were wild swings in difficulty that made level progress kinda disappointing. Some of this may have been fixed more recently; I have not played in at least two months.
Seems hard to fuck up so many game mechanics, yet here we are.
They forgot to make it fun.