Diablo IV Seems Like It’s Dead

A passionless husk of a game

Alex Rowe
9 min readSep 28, 2023

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An empty town hub in Diablo IV.
These town hubs used to be full of other players. PS5 screenshot taken by the author.

Diablo IV had a huge launch out of the gate just a few months ago, with Blizzard proudly touting it as their biggest release of all time, and big plans for a heavily monetized future.

Now, it seems like a ghost town. The always-online nature of the game means that, on a good day, you’ll see dozens of other players running around in the game’s world trading items and completing quests. But stand in any one of its major town hubs now and you’ll probably be the only person there. I used to run into people constantly during my adventures, now I’m lucky if I see even one other player in a three-hour session.

Online stream numbers have shown a similar decline, with the game lucky to draw just 600 viewers on Twitch — a far cry from the tens of thousands it had back at launch.

Player drop-off is a normal phenomenon, even for big games, but it’s not usually something that happens so dramatically in what’s supposed to be an ongoing live service…let alone for the next game in a franchise that’s one of the most popular of all time.

It sure does seem like Diablo IV is dead. And Blizzard has no one to blame for this but themselves. Here are some of the many reasons why I personally think that this game is in huge trouble, and why I uninstalled my copy…

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Alex Rowe

I write about gaming, tech, music, and their industries. Creators and fans are so much more than numbers on a graph.