Activision touts Diablo 4’s fast-selling launch — but what does that mean?

By James On Jun 6, 2023

Activision Blizzard does commend Diablo 4 as the fastest-selling Blizzard Entertainment game of all time – no mean feat for a company that also publishes World of Warcraft, and the Overwatch and Starcraft series. But what does the claim actually mean?

The press release that mentions Diablo 4The company’s success, of course, says it includes both console and PC sales, but doesn’t release specific numbers. Publishers rarely provide 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 up by player numbers, rather than unit sales or hard dollars.

“Diablo 4 has been played for 93 million hours, or more than 10,000 years,” the Activision Blizzard press release says in the opening paragraph. Not surprising when you consider that the first players got their hands on it about 100 hours ago (June 2nd, for those who pre-order one of the special editions).

However, looking back at Activision Blizzard’s previous statements about big, best, or fastest sellers, one finds:

The difference, of course, is that those three games are all PC launches – Diablo 3 only got console launches in 2013 (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) and 2014 (PS4 and Xbox One). Diablo 4 launched simultaneously on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X starting June 5.

So how big is a launch? We may find out when Activision Blizzard next reports its quarterly performance to investors – which for a June release would be around September. It still quite begs the question, did a multiplatform, day one launch of Diablo 4 delivering sales that were huge multiples of the 3, 4, and 5 million sales Activision Blizzard previously quoted? Did it barely get them out?

It’s all about setting expectations and living up to them. We’ve reached out to an Activision Blizzard representative to ask about it Diablo 4‘s unit of actual unit sales. This is watching.