According to Gamepressure, the senior project manager behind Diablo IV updated his Linkedin account to show that the game had acquired over a billion dollars in lifetime revenues. Project Manager Harrison Froeschke quickly deleted the figures from his profile thereafter.
Somewhat surprisingly, “only” $150m of that revenue generated is a result of microtransactions, with the rest going to raw sales of the title itself and DLC. Blizzard was quick to boast about Diablo IV reaching $666m of sales within the first 5 days of launch, making the total revenue figures, however obscene, entirely expected.
It has to be said that if a game like Diablo IV, which has received mix reviews, with some fans calling it the second coming of Christ while others insist it’s a rather boring, uninspired entry to the series, can pull figures of over 1 Billion dollars, that might show the precedent AAA developers are keeping an eye on when developing new games.
Sometimes, the margin for error when working for a company like Blizzard is so slim that sticking to precedents set within a genre, which might make for a boring game, is also the move that makes the game the most broadly appealing and, thus, the smartest move for profit.
This principle can be seen with FromSoftware’s Elden Ring. The studio cashed in on making an open world title by recycling all of their work from previous games and throwing it all into copy pasted gameplay fodder. Elden Ring, which is a worse title than its Soulsborne predecessors, is easily FromSoftware’s most profitable title.
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