“There’s actually millions of people that still play it” – Blizzard insists Diablo 3 still has a “massive” playerbase

It’s tempting to believe that the Diablo 3 playerbase has been eclipsed by a resurgent Diablo 2: Resurrected on one side, and Diablo 4 on the other, but according to Blizzard, that’s not the case. Apparently there’s still a “massive” playerbase playing Diablo 3, and it counts players in the “millions”.

“Each game has its own core players,” Diablo Legacy executive producer Matthew Cederquist told me during a group interview at Blizzard recently – Diablo 3 technically falls under the Legacy team’s jurisdiction. “There’s actually millions of people that still play Diablo 3.

“Even when Diablo 4 came out, some players were cannibalised and brought over to D4, but there’s still a massive player base for Diablo 3,” he added. “Every single ladder season that comes out, you will see people transition from D4 back to D3 and play for that opening weekend, or that week or so, and they’ll transition right back to D4. And vice versa D2.”

Cederquist’s remark was made when I asked about a comment by previous Diablo boss Rod Fergusson – who left Blizzard about five months ago to join 2K and lead BioShock – who told GameFile in March that, “We have more Diablo 2: Resurrected players than Diablo 3 right now.” But that statement only reflects a fleeting state in the series playerbase, Cederquist said. The Diablo audience’s playing habits are more fluid when opposed to something like, say, World of Warcraft.

“That’s the cool thing about our community,” Cederquist went on to say. “It’s less like World of Warcraft: Classic, where that’s your home, you don’t move; that’s mine, I don’t go to retail. There’s so much inter-cannibalisation.” (That’s the first time I’ve heard that phrase.)

“It’s less like World of Warcraft: Classic where that’s your home, you don’t move; that’s mine, I don’t go to retail. There’s so much inter-cannibalisation”

“The player habits are just different in a long-form progression game,” added Tim Vasconcellos, lead designer on the Diablo Legacy team. He said you spend longer doing things in World of Warcraft – levelling up your character, organising groups and raids. In Diablo games (“except maybe Diablo 1, which is unique in its own right, where I would consider it to be more of a survival horror”) it’s different.

“There’s not the same class-role dynamic saying hey we need a healer, we need a tank and then DPS,” Vasconcellos said. “Every class is DPS. Furthermore, the social expectation isn’t that we’re going to commit to having to play together to progress content.

“Is it more efficient? Yes. Is it more enjoyable? We think so. You can continue on your own if you want to and the social pressure doesn’t exist there, and so people are easily able to flow between one game to the next. That’s more feasible in today’s modern age where we have so many demands on our time, and the playerbase has also aged and they have more responsibilities to see to. I’m a Diablo dad myself. That’s just the reality; I think Diablo suits those players.”

It’s an interesting take, and a surprising dig at sibling World of Warcraft, but it doesn’t answer whether Diablo 2 consistently commands a larger audience than Diablo 3. So I pushed the point again.

“No, no – it’s not necessarily like that,” responded Cederquist. “Our games fluctuate wildly, and it’s because you have those seasonal contents. Everyone comes back for a ladder race, and actually the way we produce them is we separate them for that to happen, so we’re never going to have a D3 ladder stepping over a D2 ladder stepping over a D4 ladder. We want players to be able to say, Okay yeah, let me jump into this flavour of Diablo today, maybe this flavour of Diablo two weeks from now and so on.”

Whatever the player numbers, I expect there’s been a surge in Diablo 2 activity this week, after Diablo 2: Resurrected surprise-released a new expansion called Reign of the Warlock, which introduced a new warlock class to the game – the first new class the game has had in 25 years. The game also launched on Steam and on Game Pass, which I’m sure is bound to drive up numbers. Consider that Cederquist told me in a separate article that there were already “millions” – and he emphasised the word “millions” – of people playing Diablo 2: Resurrected, and I wonder how high the playerbase will go.