Diandra worked on Diablo 4 and also other games at Blizzard including WoW: Dragon Flight. She’s also been at Bioware, Carbine, RIOT, and she is currently working at Crystal Dynamics.
Brian was the Lead Writer on Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls, worked on StarCraft: Heart of the Swarm, StarCraft: Wings of Liberty, and was also a writer on Mass Effect 2. He’s also been involved in movies such as the Iron Giant.
Diandra and Brian discuss their industry experience, the games they have worked on, how the writing process works, and much more.
Xbox Game Pass and Diablo 4 are a match made in heaven, with the hellish RPG series blazing a path for ActiBlizz’s future on the service.
“Last month we added our first Activision Blizzard title, Diablo 4, to our Game Pass service,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says during the company’s latest earnings call. “Subscribers played over 10 million hours within the first 10 days, making it one of our biggest first-party Game Pass launches ever.”
Sarah Bond announced this a few weeks back. That's the gamepass effect I suppose.
Guess they had to find at least one glimmer of positive news to combat the poor Xbox hardware sales trends. GamePass stats on game from a 1st party studio that they spent $70bn to acquire are kind of useless IMO, especially when other than Act/Bliz the entire XBOX division was flat. I hope that spike on Diablo 4 was worth having to the XBOX brand go multi platform for.
They probably all fell asleep due to severe boredom and left their consoles on overnight.
I really don't get the obsession with these stats. So what? Is always my response.
If 10 million people bought the game, it doesn't matter at all how long they played it for. It's irrelevant. The sale is made, the revenue is earned. The person can take a year to finish the game for all the developers care.
If 10 million played the game on a sub, what does it achieve? They could play 1 hour and delete it as quickly as they downloaded it. I've done this with games like Need for Speed Unbound or Immortals of Aveum, I just don't have the time for every single game.
Unless Games Pass generates developer and publisher revenue for every hour spent, this is meaningless.
If you are considering getting Diablo 4, Steam offers an incredible discount, so now is the perfect time to do it.
The developer of Garry's Mod has announced it is in the process of removing all Nintendo-related content from Steam Workshop after receiving a takedown request from Nintendo.