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.
With maybe the notable exception of multiplayer games, all games will be at least just as good a year after launch as they are at launch day.
Add to it that in a year’s time there will be enough reviews out there from people who actually played it longer than 5h and the heavy marketing phase will be more than over so it’s actually possible to get a hype-free overview of it, AND the game itself will likely be better than at launch due to bug fixing in the meanwhile and maybe even some content added, and it’s the logical thing to never buy before or at launch and just wait.
However most people have problems with “reward delaying” (and actual psychological term for the ability to wait for something to be more ‘rewarding’ before going for it) and “just have to have it now!” and that just overrides logic (assuming they even took the time to think about it in the first place).