Diablo 4 is Losing Players Faster Than WoW and Overwatch 2
It seems that the gaming community is starting to get bored with Diablo IV. Confirmation of this trend can be seen in the declining number of viewers on Twitch.
June release of Diablo IV was remarkably smooth and successful for Blizzard. The next installment of the long-running series was also positively assessed by industry critics. As it later turned out, these were good beginnings of bad, and the culminating moment turned out to be the fateful update 1.1.0, released before the start of the first season of online play.
And although the patch became a spark for a massive wave of criticism that fell on Blizzard, the popularity of Diablo IV began to decline much earlier. The shrinking community of fans of the action RPG is perfectly reflected in the statistics of viewers on Twitch.
According to the information presented by the audience calculator SullyGnome, on the day of the release of early access, Diablo IV was followed by 937,361 people on the platform. Subsequently, these results dropped minimally to jump up to 686,936 viewers at the time of the official debut..
Drastic decline
Unfortunately, Blizzard will soon be left with beautiful memories of those numbers, because in recent days Diablo IV is being followed on Twitch by well under 20,000 people. For example, on August 7, at the peak, the RPG attracted 13,601 viewers.
The exception is August 8, the day of the release of update 1.1.1, which was primarily meant to fix what the previous patch broke. The curiosity of the community led to 48,729 people watching the broadcasts of the game. However, this does not change the fact that in recent weeks the decline in popularity of Diablo IV has been downright shocking.
Diablo IV compared to others
In order to get a better insight into the situation in which the action RPG finds itself, we checked how two recent Blizzard games fared under similar conditions - Overwatch 2 and World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.
It is clear that in both cases there are also declines, but they are not as drastic as in the case of Diablo IV. Overwatch 2 was still doing very well on Twitch two months after its release, gathering between 50,000 and 60,000 people.
In contrast two months after the release of the Dragonflight DLC for WoW the number of viewers oscillated around 80 thousand.
So you don't have to be an eagle in math to notice that compared to the aforementioned games, Diablo IV performs significantly worse. Perhaps if the action RPG's gameplay was aimed exclusively at a single player, such results would be quite normal, but in this case we're talking about a game that places the greatest emphasis on network play.
There is no doubt that these numbers should be a warning signal for Blizzard. If the developers do not react in time, there will be nothing left to save. Nevertheless, the first steps toward rebuilding player trust have already been taken with the aforementioned patch 1.1.1, which proved successful.
The changes and innovations it introduced to Diablo IV were to the community's liking - in addition to buffs for heroes, the density of monsters has been improved and bosses and the chance of loot dropping have been slightlt increased. Also improved were Helltides, making players get more glowing ash.
