Highlights
- Diablo 4's Twitch viewership has plummeted by over 98% since the launch of season one, indicating potential trouble for Blizzard's live-service experience.
- The decline in viewership suggests that significant portions of the Diablo community may already be dissatisfied with how the developer is handling the game.
- Despite the decline in Twitch viewership, Diablo 4 has still seen over 7 million characters created for its first season, leaving the question of whether players will stick around for future content.
Diablo 4's Twitch viewing numbers have dropped by over 98% since the launch of season one, according to a third-party Twitch statistics tracker. Though this isn't necessarily a huge issue in and of itself, the numbers paint a stark picture for what is supposed to be Blizzard's premier live-service experience in a rich and storied intellectual property.
While it's still far too early to say whether Path of Exile 2 will beat Diablo 4 proper, the early showing made by Blizzard's flagship release isn't all too promising as it currently stands. Instead, it appears that significant portions of the Diablo community are already done with their Diablo 4 honeymoon period, and may already be less than thrilled with how the developer is handling its live-service game.
Notably, Twitch's third-party analytics service SullyGnome.com reports that Diablo 4 has gone from almost a million peak daily viewers all the way down to just over 13,000 peak daily viewers just three weeks after the release of its first big seasonal batch of content. Viewership numbers only suggest so much, of course, but it is a potential sign that things aren't going all that well for Blizzard. Moreover, since Diablo 4 is a live-service title, it will live and die by its concurrent player counts, and its Twitch viewership stats suggest that interest is rather low.
The surprising lack of interest in the game on Twitch may have something to do with Diablo 4's Season 1 release, which left many players displeased even in the early days of its launch. Many believe that Blizzard did basically everything wrong with Season 1, forcing players to engage with more of the same type of thing they had been doing from day one, and with very few novelties or positive balancing changes to show for it.
It's no secret that Diablo 4 has serious scaling problems, too, leaving large batches of its content completely unviable after players reach a certain level of progression. Blizzard has been struggling with the topic of scaling since the game first came out, and it doesn't seem like the studio's figured out what it wants to do with Diablo 4's baseline content just yet.
Finally, even though the stats over at SullyGnome suggest a troublesome time ahead, it's not all bad for Blizzard. With over 7 million characters made for Diablo 4 Season 1, people are definitely engaging with the game's live service offerings. The only remaining question is whether the community will stick around for more of the same for months and years to come, as Blizzard figures out the right approach to its seasonal content cadence.
Diablo 4 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: SullyGnome
