Diablo continues to be a huge deal, and I’m not just talking about the latest entry, even if it is Blizzard’s fastest-selling game ever. Millions of people went straight back to Diablo 3, and as the series’ lead producer Matthew Cederquist told Polygon in a recent interview, Diablo’s 26-year-old sophomore release is still surprisingly active.
It makes sense that there’s renewed interest in D2 given that it just got an additional class, the warlock, via its first new expansion in a quarter-century, but the extent of its popularity might surprise you. Polygon points out that players created 1.92 million warlocks between Feb. 11 and March 11. Players also collectively played the expansion for a whopping 93.4 million hours, suggesting that Diablo is pretty moreish no matter which decade it’s from.
“There’s so many fans that were just screaming at the top of the mountain to give them something,” Cederquist told Polygon. “It was nice because players moved extremely quickly from, ‘I can’t believe Diablo 2 has a new class, oh my God,’ to actually doing what players do best, which is digging into the game, testing builds, arguing about synergies, making build guides, and then preparing for the new ladder that came out with it.”
With a potential future for the pre-expansion version of World of Warcraft on the horizon and Heroes of the Storm continuing to get balance updates years after it was shifted to maintenance mode, it’s interesting to see Blizzard’s approach to its older games shift with the times.
The studio is so gargantuan these days that it can keep several versions of the same game afloat and active simultaneously. Given how diverse the larger ARPG space is even outside of the big dogs—a paradigm PC Gamer contributor Russell Adderson called “a golden age” for the genre—it’s hard not to feel spoiled for choice.
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