Diablo 4 is Blizzard’s fastest selling game of all time

Activision Blizzard touts Diablo 4 as the fastest-selling Blizzard Entertainment game of all time — no small feat for a company that also publishes World of WarcraftThe Overwatch series and Starcraft are also included. But what is the real meaning of this statement?

News releases that include Diablo 4’s success, of course, says it includes both console and PC sales, but doesn’t divulge specific figures. Publishers rarely give up this information anymore, largely because they don’t want points of comparison for later releases in the same franchise. That’s why you get claims like “fastest selling,” which are backed by playership numbers, rather than unit sales or hard dollars.

“Diablo 4 has been played for 93 million hours, or over 10,000 years,” Activision Blizzard’s news release says in its first paragraph. The first player got the game about 100 hours before (June 2, if you preordered any special editions).

Looking back through Activision Blizzard’s earlier statements about big, best, or fastest sellers, though, one finds:

The difference, of course, is those three games are all PC launches — Diablo 3 didn’t get console launches until 2013 (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) and 2014 (PS4 and Xbox One). Diablo 4 On June 5, the game will be simultaneously released on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 Windows PCs, Xbox One Series X, and Xbox One.

How big is the launch? Perhaps we’ll find out when Activision Blizzard next reports its quarterly performance to investors — which for a June release would be around September. The question remains: Did a day-one multiplatform launch really work? Diablo 4Did it deliver massive sales multiples the 3 million, 4 million and 5 millions sales Activision Blizzard had quoted earlier? It barely edged them?

It’s all a matter of setting and beating expectations. We’ve reached out to an Activision Blizzard representative to ask about Diablo 4’s unit actual unit sales. Watch this closely.