Blizzard say Diablo IV is their fastest selling game ever

Diablo 4 is Blizzard’s “fast-selling game of all time”, according to Blizzard themselves. They’re not sharing how many copies it has sold exactly, but the figures are based on all platforms as of June 5th, the day before the action-RPG’s full launch. Blizzard also say that the clickfest has been played for 93 million hours during its early access period.

Does it matter that these larger sales figures are partly because Diablo IV is multi-platform at launch, where most previous Blizzard games were not, and partly a measure of the greater accessibility provided by digital distribution? And does it matter that most of the games Blizzard Entertainment have released in the past ten years were either World Of Warcraft or StarCraft 2 expansions, or were free-to-play games that hadn’t “sold” anything at launch? No, not really. This is an arbitrary milestone meant to communicate that Diablo IV is popular. And it is.

For a sense of how many copies Diablo IV might have shifted: back in 2020, Blizzard called World Of Warcraft: Shadowlands the “fastest-selling PC game of all time” after it sold 3.7 million copies on or before launch day. This beat the previous record holder, Blizzard’s own Diablo 3, which sold 3.5 million copies in 2012. (Cyberpunk 2077 beat those figures later the same year, selling 4.72 million on PC out of a total sales of 8 million.) So across PC and console, Diablo IV must have sold at least 3.7 million.

93 million hours, meanwhile, is over 10,000 years. Consider Alice B’s Diablo IV review, in which she comments that, “You’ll spend six hours playing the game and yet it will feel like half an hour has passed, and that you achieved nothing.” That would mean those 10,000 years would feel like a mere 833.33 years. And that we have all still achieved nothing.