Diablo 4 succeeded where Concord and Suicide Squad failed. How come?

Live gaming is in a difficult transitional moment. While the industry increasingly consumes the time of millions of players, successful new game releases are few and far between. work stoppage have Increase. Series like Destiny and Strike Force have turned to free-to-play models in an attempt to keep player numbers strong, as well as premium live-service games — games that pay full purchase price and some that monetize players. intention. Long term – they are an endangered breed.

In 2024, two high-profile and major failures occurred for premium live streaming services. Rocksteady’s “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” WB Games suffered a heavy loss of $200 million, and Sony’s losses were even more severe harmony It failed to resonate with players and was unceremoniously shut down after a few weeks. (Sony does launch live service hits in the form of: Hellraiser 2But judging from the publisher’s marketing efforts for the two games, hell diver Sony executives don’t seem to expect – and perhaps even want – success.

However, Blizzard’s 2023 version Diablo 4 is a certified hit with huge sales, strong expansion in 2024, and clearly a cult audience. How did you buck the trend? For Rod Fergusson, the famed Gears of War producer who later became the general manager of the Diablo series, it was because Blizzard had no intention of making a live-service game. The studio only set out to make a Diablo game, but Diablo’s action-RPG nature required it to be a live-service game.

“I’m back in the genre,” Ferguson told Polygon in a November interview. “Earlier, there were these conversations. […] yes Diablo 4 An instant service game or should we roll the points and call it? I was like, look, when you look Diablo 3 Millions of people show up every season, and whether you like it or not, ARPG is Essentially On-site service. The question is what you do about it.

For Ferguson, the live service is an opportunity to continually improve and rebuild the game, but only if the audience’s demand to continue playing emerges naturally from the game’s design. “To me, when you’re like Diablo, […] People will look forward to playing the entire campaign, but then they’ll look forward to playing what I call a hundred or thousand hour game. They want to be able to continue this progression, they want to have the power fantasy, they want to come back to it again and again. This creates room for developers to constantly inject new ideas into the game to keep it fresh. “It’s a great thing,” Ferguson said. “That’s not how it works fait accompli We’ll say, “It’s in the box, we’re done.” We’ll have the ability to improve Hell Tide. We’re going to have the ability to add pits, we’re going to have the ability to try challenges.

Here’s a simple lesson for game publishers: don’t force it. when suicide squad Immediately after the preview, players commented that the game didn’t seem to fit into the immediate service framework; it didn’t flow naturally from the game’s storyline or genre. harmony It’s in the right genre – it’s a hero shooter – but it seems to have been made to satisfy publisher demand for a ready-to-serve game rather than player demand for a Battlefield alternative. The game concept didn’t come first.

in turn, Diablo 4 It works because people want a new Diablo game, and they want to play it for hundreds of hours. It’s like a reversal of a classic line dream land: Not “if you build it, they will come,” but “they will come…so you better build it.”