Diablo IV peaks at just over 5k concurrent players on Steam, with players criticizing Blizzard for microtransactions

Diablo IV has finally launched on Steam, as Blizzard games continue to arrive on Valve’s platform, However, player reception has been far from great so far.

Blizzard released Diablo IV on Steam on October 17. This is the studio’s second game to appear on the platform following the launch of Overwatch 2.

So far, Diablo IV has failed to attract enough interest from Steam players, only peaking at 5,309 concurrent players (via SteamDB). The number is slowly rising, but it is by no means a great result.

When it comes to player reception, Diablo IV currently holds a “Mixed” rating, with 55% of the 476 user reviews being positive. Many criticized the game not for its mechanics or technical state (in fact, its performance on Steam Deck received praise), but for its additional monetization focused on battle passes and in-app purcahses. Some players even encouraged others to buy games like Baldur’s Gate 3 instead of Diablo IV.

So reviews in this case are about expressing frustration with Blizzard, as some users specifically mentioned that the studio and franchises they once loved are “already dead.”

One of the main reasons behind the lackluster launch on Steam is that most fans and people interested in playing Diablo IV had already bought it when it came out on Battle.net, PlayStation, and Xbox in June.

In its first five days, it generated $666 million globally, becoming Blizzard’s fastest-selling game ever. According to Newzoo, Diablo IV was also the highest-grossing title in the US and UK on both PC and consoles in July.

So its launch on Steam was just part of the new strategy of gradually bringing all Blizzard games, which remained exclusive to its Battle.net platform on PC, to Steam. It is hard to say whether the company had high hopes for this release, especially since Diablo IV is already one of the most successful AAA releases of 2023.

This strategy also makes sense because Activision Blizzard is now owned by Microsoft, which releases all of its first-party titles on Xbox, Microsoft Store, Game Pass, and Steam.

One fact, however, can’t be denied: Blizzard’s first two releases on Steam received huge backlash from players. Overwatch 2, which peaked at 75.6k concurrent players (mainly because it is free-to-play), is currently the second-worst rated game on Steam of all time, with only 1o% of the nearly 200k user reviews being positive.