Enthusiasm for Diablo 4 is trending downward according to multiple sources. Less than a month after the launch of the game’s first season, not only is viewership dwindling but the game has also lost hundreds of thousands of players.
Diablo 4’s launch shattered records for Blizzard and the game released to heapings of praise early on. In the intervening month and change, interest in the game has taken some massive hits.
The launch of Diablo 4 Season of the Malignant was met with a frosty reception. Fans maligned what they considered a thin spread of seasonal content, baffling balance changes, and “boring” loot systems.
While Blizzard themselves have not released any data on the game’s player base, third-party sites have been actively tracking the game. They show that Diablo 4 has lost close to 600,000 daily players in less than a month.
Data from ActivePlayer.io shows Diablo 4’s daily player count plummeted from over 1 million at the end of July to 400,000 over the last 30 days. The number of monthly players also dropped by 122,000 over the same period.
Similar trends are occurring with Twitch viewership for Diablo 4 as well. According to TwitchTracker, peak viewership saw a steep decline from 941,000 in June just to just 34,400 in August so far.
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Live service games like Diablo 4 will usually have peaks in interest at the beginning of a new season followed by drop-offs. Still, this decline in interest is likely due to a number of other factors as well.
The game’s end-game content has been a sore point for fans and a perceived lack of build diversity is souring the experience for some as well. The recent release of another massively popular RPG may have had an impact as well.
Baldur’s Gate 3 launched to astounding success and is one of the most highly-rated games of all time. The game broke records on Steam by cracking its top ten highest concurrent players of all time list.
Some of those players have likely migrated from Diablo 4 and another company has Blizzard’s ARPG in its sights too. Grinding Gear developers said they plan to learn from Blizzard’s mistakes to ensure the upcoming Path of Exile 2 is a success.