ActiBlizzard have published a press release for today's Conference Call and the numbers are in. You can read the full report here.
- Diablo III was the #1 best-selling PC game at retail, breaking PC game sales records with more than 12 million copies sold worldwide through December 31, 2012
- As of December 31, 2012, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft remains the #1 subscription-based MMORPG, with more than 9.6 million subscribers
Diablo III Lectures on GDC 2013
Gamasutra has reported that Blizzard will be attending GDC 2013 and Jay Wilson will be giving a lecture on Diablo 3! Read below for the details.
Shout at the Devil: The Making of Diablo III
When building any game, but especially when it's a sequel to the beloved Diablo series, it's critical that you have a series of core design goals, or pillars, that you can use as a guide to making decisions and defining what you want the final vision of the game to accomplish. In this postmortem, we'll explore the pillars that guided Diablo III's development and how well we felt we accomplished each of them. We'll focus specifically on the ones we feel we struggled with and the game design lessons we learned during those struggles. Examples of specific challenges of living up to these values will be provided, prioritizing them against one another, and evaluating how well they were accomplished after Diablo III was released.
Takeaway
Attendees will receive insight into the value of defining the core design elements that will drive their game development. In addition, they will learn the importance of measuring their game against those values, and using that knowledge to iterate on the final product, both pre- and post-release.
Intended Audience
This talk is intended for a general audience, including those who are interested in game design as well as project leadership. Project leads of all levels will also gain the benefits of good lessons learned on driving and iterating a game's vision. The intention is for the talk to be general enough that specific knowledge of the Diablo series is not necessary, but such knowledge will be beneficial.
Poll: Who's Your Favorite Diablo III Villain?
This week's poll asks which of all the bosses in Diablo 3 is your favorite.
Originally Posted by Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
(From cleaver-wielding brutes to gluttonous lieutenants to scandalous, araneidan concubines, Sanctuary's villains are as varied in appearance as they are in purpose.
But of the all the dastardly evil-doers your heroes must face in battle, who is your favorite? Put a different way: in your opinion, which of these malevolent miscreants do you think deserves the title "Best Bad Guy," and why?
But of the all the dastardly evil-doers your heroes must face in battle, who is your favorite? Put a different way: in your opinion, which of these malevolent miscreants do you think deserves the title "Best Bad Guy," and why?
Witch Doctor Fan Art
This very awesome Witch Doctor fan piece was created by Deviant Art user Ziom05 and featured recently on Diablo's official Twitter account. Check out Ziom05's gallery for lots more very detailed art, including more creations with a Blizzard theme.
Jay Wilson, For crushing everyones hopes and dreams
Jay Wilson, for crushing everyones hopes and dreams
1) Why do they bother to bring up this number? The only number that matters is how sales continued after about a month from release. Before that everyone was picking this up under the understandable expectation that this game would have been good considering the franchise history.
2) Notice how they have to say "subcription-based"? Nearly all MMOs out there are NOT subscription-based. Congrats on being #1 in a nearly empty room Blizzard.
Jay Wilson, for crushing everyones hopes and dreams
Edit: This is not trolling, this is the truth
Hahahahaha, couldn't have said it better myself! >.<
When you build pillars you should use concrete, or another proven-to-wok material. This half complete, someone somewhere said would work just as good product has, tainted this franchise.
... just trying to fit in.
Also: That's a lot.
"Diablo III Has Sold Over 12 Million Copies" - Well, thats because PoE is f2p ..
Blizzard troll ... trying to make you believe that D3 was not fail, this news does not make me want to play it yet again...
And you know the reason for pretty every mmo being subscription free is due to the fact wow killed em.
As I recall, Diablo III sold 10 million copies in the initial release rush.
Which means it sold another 2 million copies after that.
Which means it sold more copies than most games manage to sell at all even after (a) all the jonesing fans had picked up their copy at launch, and (b) the noisy whining minority had spilled epic floods of tears telling everyone how much they hated it.
Close. They sold 3.5 mil copies in the first 24 hours. 6.3 mil copies in the first week, including those from the WoW annual pass. By July they were up to 10 mil. So, From July to December 2012, they managed to sell an additional 2 million copies.
That being said, that's actually pretty respectable numbers. I know that a lot of people rant and rave about D3 being a disappointment, but I recall leveling my first character from 1-60 with my friends and I honestly couldn't remember a time I had as much fun playing a game. It wasn't until Inferno (and the messy state it was in at the time) that the game lost it's appeal. Since those times, a lot of my personal issues have been fixed, Inferno being a pretty substantial one (I mean, some elite packs being harder than most bosses? come on).
Now most of my friends no longer play the game, and I don't play it nearly as much as I used to, but I can still log in for a couple hours here and there and enjoy a decent game session every now and then, which is pretty much how I played D2 back in the day. Not only that, but the game seems to be getting better (or getting fixed, however you want to look at it) with every patch they release. As long as that remains true, I can see D3 continuing to sell. However, Blizzard can't stop with the improvements / *fixes*.
Also, I personally am looking forward to the prospect of the first expansion. Try to remember Diablo 2 and what it was before LoD came out. LoD added quite a bit to the game that kept players coming back for more and I expect more from D3's expansion, especially given the state of the game when it first launched. Expectations are going to be running even higher than normal and could very much make or break what remains of the Diablo franchise.
Again though, assuming Blizzard can do it right (and they've been doing a good job so far with every patch), Diablo will continue to sell extremely well.
It's an investor's call, not a call to please/aggrevate/whatever gamers who want to hate on the games every chance they get. I suggest you look up such terms before you try to be cool on the internet. You make yourself look dumber than you most likely are.
If I could have, I would have changed two things about the game as it was at launch: more exciting itemisation, by which I mean adding whacky procs and other bits of random fun which were less about the numbers and more about the spectacle, and less re-treading of the same ground as Diablo 2, in terms of locations and themes. That's about it though. In terms of stomping over ten-thousand demons and killing Diablo, it delivered mightily.
Perhaps Inferno was broken, I don't know, and I don't really care. It's not what I play for. It's a minority that plays on the cutting edge of the farming game, but it's right and proper that Blizzard have fixed/are fixing the situation.
The negative hype was certainly overdone, but to call the release product anything but a disappointment is objectively biased.
Edit: By the way I'm hoping that this forum will turn out to be less toxic than, say IncGamers or the Blizzard forums. I'd love to be able to talk about this game without the constant negative noise.
Because the sub-based games can't get 9 million players, so they go free to play. See SWToR most recently.
I don't think there's even an F2P MMO out there that can put up those numbers.
WoW is the Hammer of the Ancients on the MMO community. No MMO could compete which is why they eventually went F2P. None of the big studio mmo games started F2P, they all wanted a piece of the big pie that blizz is eating.