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The Diablo 4 Steam release is struggling, with mixed reviews and less than 2,500 players
(www.pcgamesn.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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That Blizzard is selling their games on Steam at all speaks volumes about how poorly they are doing.
All of the design talent and experience has been purged from their ranks in the last 10-12 years. They are a trash tier developer and have burned all the nostalgic goodwill of their past successes.
Kotick killed the golden goose, ruined countless careers and lives, and now he gets to leave with hundreds of millions at the end of the year. Capitalism at is finest.
No, it doesn't at all. All of this was just preparation for the Microsoft acquisition, by having Actiblizzard games in a third party platform as a way to show that they're "not creating a monopoly"
They why not on epic?
Because the Epic Launcher is a flaming pile of shit.
I agree, but if Blizzard was just trying to pretend to be a fair company, they launched their product on a near monopoly platform and chose badly.
Steam is not a monolopy platform. The Blizzard launcher is more of a monolopy platform than Steam is. Epic pays for exclusivity deals to keep games off other launchers. Steam has never done that with any games except their own.
Nobody sells on Epic unless Epic pay them.
What's crazy amongst all this madness is whatever skeleton crew they stuck in a closet to tend to the corpse of D3 has been knocking it out of the park lately. It's like they got a green light to do whatever and started ticking features from the community wishlist. It won't last much longer as after next season it'll just be cycling through previous content. But at least for now, someone over there appears to care.
And at a 25% discount so soon after launch. It's crazy!
It's 25% on Xbox too
It's so sad to see one of the greatest gaming companies in history go down such a dark path..
It feels like almost yesterday when I was unwrapping that fresh copy of WarCraft II and being stunned by the CGI intro, seeing the Orcs on their great warships and thinking "Holy hell".
What happened, man? Why does money ruin absolutely fucking everything?
Because nobody who gets a sufficiently large amount of it to stop worrying about their finances is ever satisfied with that amount of money.
It says nothing of how “poorly” they’re doing. A big portion of the PC master race crowd are hardcore steam Stan’s that are “no steam no buy”. Releasing on steam brings extra sales that they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.
As for the rest of your rant, well the less said the better. Kotick has made every part of ABK the most successful they’ve ever been.
Strange, looking at Steam Charts, the peak player count for them on steam is 3,442 players. Now sure that’s technically more sales, but I have to wonder if it was worth the effort.
Worth the effort? It's zero effort. They don't have to re-make the game to release it on a different PC launcher. What's the total player count for steam? Peak is irrelevant, it's not an online shooter that needs a huge concurrent player count.
A quick google for steam charts shows shows a 24 hour peak concurrent players of 7,152 players, double your figure. You seem to be looking at the current number of concurrent players, not peak. 7152 x USD$60 is almost half a million dollars, just in people that played at the exact same time in the last 24 hours, for a release that would have taken 1 guy an hour to do.
The game is also more popular on consoles than ever and available on battlenet, where most diablo players on PC buy diablo. Using steam numbers to say diablo 4 is a failure is like the people using Steam numbers to say Starfield is a failure. Those people are eating crow currently seeing as Starfield was the number 1 selling game in the US in its release month and went straight to the 7th best selling game of the year after people called it a "complete bomb".
I can’t see why they would willingly let Steam have a percentage of the profit unless they desperately needed the extra exposure, when their own launcher and such has been working fine for, what, over a decade?
Because giving valve 30% of a new sale is better than no sale. Again - the only people buying the game on steam are people that are "no steam no buy" or people buying the game again. Diablo doesn't need exposure, it's one of the biggest gaming franchises around. What they want is more players and more money - not because it failed, but because that's what profit driven companies do.
Also microsoft release all their PC games on steam, and Microsoft just bought Blizzard so this was likely done in preparation for the purchase.
Minecraft.
What about it? You’re surely not going to try and use the literal best selling game of all time as an example of something are you?
It's not on Steam lol
Yeh and they have no reason to put it on there. The “no steam no buy” people aren’t buying minecraft if it goes on steam.