Math Time: Diablo IV Edition

As reported by GamePressure:

Blizzard has earned a significant amount of revenue from Diablo IV in the over a year since its release. Harrison Froeschke, the Senior Product Manager for the discussed title, provided an estimated amount generated by the fourth installment of the popular hack and slash.

Surprisingly, this information was not made public on the developer's official website, but on Froeschke's LinkedIn profile, specifically in his job description. Diablo IV has generated more than a billion dollars in revenue since its release, including approximately 150 million dollars from in-game microtransactions.

Wow, that sure sounds like a lot of moolah, don't it? But how's about we apply a little persepective to this figure?

Shortly after the launch of its console version, Diablo III had achieved "lifetime sell-through of the game across all platforms [of] over 14 million copies." Interestingly, this is actually down half a million from the 14.5 million "unique players" that Blizzard was claiming as of the first anniversary of Diablo III's release, so, you know... shenanigans. But whether their sales total is 14 million or 14.5 million, at a cost of 60 USD per copy, that works out to somewhere between USD 840 million and USD 870 million for the base game alone. Let's split the difference and call it USD 855 million for D3.

Diablo IV launched at USD 70 each, and has USD 1 billion in revenue, of which USD 150 million is in-game purchases like season's passes and expensive cosmetics. That leaves only USD 850 million in game sales, or 12.14 million units. Which is, as predicted, less than Diablo III, by about 14.3%

Now, factor in the known consumer behavior of in-game purchasers, in which 5% of players spend money in-game at all, and over half of in-game spend comes from just 1% that game's players. It sure looks like most of Diablo IV's in-game revenue could well be coming from only 5% of the game's 12 million paying customers... which would be a fraction of the paying customers who felt positively about the game out of the gate.

Everywhere I look today, Diablo IV partner creators are high on copium, trying desperately to spin this as great news from Blizzard. But this news didn't come from any official channel of Blizzard; rather, it came from the LinkedIn page of a Blizzard employee who was padding out his resume. Publicly traded companies with good numbers to report normally can't shut up about them, so the fact that Blizzard hasn't talked about Diablo IV's sales since a week after the game launched speaks very clearly of those numbers being disappointing, and learning via this back-channel that D4 is underselling D3 by 14% merely confirms what everyone should already have suspected.

Even this billion-dollar number still looks like a shrinking of the Diablo fan base, with resume-padding Blizzard employees having to add mtx sales to the total to make this game look like anything akin to a win, so I feel pretty confident about my earlier predictions that Vessel of Hatred is basically doomed. A billion dollars is a billion dollars, sure, but if the only ongoing revenue is a relative trickle of mtx bux, without the unit sales of the game's expansions adding to the size of the money pile? I don't see how D4 can have a future.