Diablo 3 Sales Predicted at 3.5 Million Units This Year
Posted 5 May 2012 by EllyThe industry analysts have been number crunching again and the latest predicted sales figures by analysts Sterne Agee have the game selling 3.5 million copies in 2012.
“We think Diablo III, which is releasing after a gap of 12 years since the launch of Diablo II, has the potential to sell more than 4 million units life-time,” said Bhatia. “We note that Diablo II had sold 4m units by August 2001 or 14 months following its initial release in June 2010.”
Considering they predict that the game will sell 3.5 million by the end of this year, surely it would sell a lot more that 4 million in its lifetime? With the WoW annual pass making up around 1 million plus of the 3.5 million sales and pre-orders at around the 800,000 mark in the US alone (source VGChartz), the game should easily shift more than 4 million in its lifetime due to the replay value of the game.
As a comparison to a recent big release, pre-orders for Mass Effect 3 reached 985,000 during the week before launch and hit 1.3 million sales in the first month of release.
Thanks IncGamers
Makes sense. Keep in mind that most of the overall purchases will be people who are interested in the game, and therefore very likely to buy it at launch or at least within the year. Those who decide to hold off for a sale, people who don’t like the genre (and later change their minds), and people who emerge from year-long hibernations are the minority.
I always wonder how the cost of development stacks up against sales. If they sell four million units, that comes out to around 240 million dollars if you don’t include CE sales. For a game that’ been in development as long as this has I can’t help but wonder what the profit margin is. I’ve always been curious about how this kinda thing works out on the financial side of development as you rarely get many developers who talk about it.
Well, they have stated their Diablo 3 development team is quite small, around 40 people. Overestimate $10,000 monthly salary per developer, and total development time around 7 years. Gives $10,000 * 40 * 12 * 7 = $33,6 Million USD.
They will easily make a profit from Diablo 3, however, it will be a drop in the water compared to their WoW profits. It’s also a reason why they are very careful with what other games they develop, and what features they will have.
40 people working directly on the game, but look at the Credits for any Blizzard game and it’s 500+ people, all of which have some sort of involvement. Now obviously a lot of these people will do work on multiple games (eg cinematics team, QA and test, marketing etc) but they all contribute costs to the projects they work on. You also need to consider the overall overheads of the business itself: electricity, heating, building maintenance, insurance etc.
I suspect that without the RMAH, the D3 business case isn’t stellar.
Salaries aren’t all. There’s also stuff like paying rent for the building they are in, buying the computers they develop on, buying the servers & server bandwidth. Then there’s all sorts of misc stuff like buying toilet paper. And for more major costs there’s marketing/advertisement, e.g. that TV spot during Family Guy wasn’t free.
Agree about all additional costs. Which makes me wonder why they don’t put all their efforts on MMO versions of Diablo and StarCraft, with a monthly fee. Together with Blizzard quality, that’s where they can haul in the big money. Sure, not all people can or will play all 3 MMOs, but together I am sure the total number of subscriptions will be more than WoW alone today.
I guess Project Titan will be an MMO, but it will be unrelated to their current franchises. And probably totally uninteresting to me. Ah, well.
Are you serious? You want fed Vivendi even more? They not Blizzard earn billions with WoW for minimal effort.
WoW is best example for gold business model, minimum effort, maximum profit.
I remember them saying Starcraft 2 ultimately cost 100 million dollars to make.
That was a screwup: http://kotaku.com/5594862/starcraft-ii-did-not-cost-100-million-to-make
It’s $100M for WoW.
*Sigh*.
For some reason this site blocks URLs, even for long-time registered members.
The $100M figure was a screwup by Wall Street Journal, it is actually $100M for WoW.
Your comment motivated me to go check and yours was indeed held for moderation. Only a small % of comments get that, but of the 11 that were sitting there from the past day or 2, 8 were spam with links to diet pills and such crap. Which is why the wordpress comments spam blocker plug ins tend to lock up comments with links. I don’t think there’s any configuration on it that allows link-filled comments from users based on when they registered or anything like that; just whatever algorithm or suspect sites the spam blocker add flags with.
If they use Hollywood accounting practices, they’ll lose money. A lot. Yet, they’ll have record sales.
And Mass Effect 3 was meh! Though it definitely had a more appealing (to a total stranger) marketing…
Really? Do you have links to a comparative study on the effects of Diablo 3′s marketing campaign versus that of Mass Effect 3 on total strangers? Since you’re someone who isn’t a stranger I’m sure you realize that you’re unqualified to make this judgement yourself and are instead referring to some objective data from an empirical study, right?
Me3 featured a trailer that was showing spaceships fighting what looked like alien spaceships, earth, and the rugged commander shepard, a human. Gunfights on earth between humans and aliens, typical hollywood stuff.
D3 featured a trailer showing some sort of armor guy with fiery wings, a demon thing, a church getting hit by a meteor(?), a fat spider thing with a burning face, some teenage chick and this gross old dude. One is easily more accessible than the other, I would think.
Were they showing ME3 advertisements on The Family Guy? They aired an ad on The Walking Dead, and while that’s a popular program, I didn’t think that their advertising efforts were anywhere near as mainstream as Blizzard’s.
It’s not purely a matter of accessibility – on that note I’d have to agree, if for no other reason than that the fast cuts of the D3 ads make it harder to figure out exactly what’s going on, compared to the longer live-action shots of ME3′s ads. “More appealing marketing”, however, seems like a broad category to me, as it would have to do not only with the content of the advertisements themselves, but also their usage and placement.
Hssssssss!
To compare todays market sales to a 10 year old game seems confusing to me. Are they also telling us that the same amount of people play games today as 10 years ago? I understand that there is a lot more competition and diversity in gaming today than ever b4 however I just can’t see such an anticipated title as D3 underselling its predecessor period. And that’s not taking into account ease of access to games in the way of digital copy downloads these days. I don’t think these guys have a clue quite frankly, dubious at best.
anticipated by who ?
its been 12 years since D2
people on this board know the Diablo series inside and out, but people on this board are not the average gamer
we’re talking about a generation raised on consoles, Maple Story and WoW
I still think a lot of people are going to buy it just to see if it lives up to the hype. Sequel’s to success’s always do well. If D3′s stinks then D4 will flop. But its running on the back of a cheetah, its going to sell.
4 million this year, 4 million more during the next 10 years. not including the consoles.
cuz that’s just how they roll.
no way in hell is Diablo 3 going to sell only 4 mil lifetime.. since the diablo series sold in over 17 million copies lifetime… i would be surprised if they sold less then 5 mil by the end of the year
It doesn’t say “4 million total”, it says “at least 4 million”.
From Elly’s commentary, it seems she mis-read it too.
so diablo 3, what i believe to be the most anticipated game ever(at least by me and at least a million other people) is supposed to sell 4 million copies this year?? i predict that for the first week… i feel sorry for the millions of gamers that wont get it
considering basicly every friend that play games is getting D3 with many uping their machines to play it at max , i just dont belive the number could be this low …. also it should have bigger sales then SC2 …
These statement are completely useless without being able to see the study behind it.
Yep like all statements without being able to see the raw data it meaningless.
In this case the only raw data that I know they used is the USA Pre-Order Chart, but that just 1 Country.
SC2 sold almost 4 million in its first month. -_-” There’s no way Diablo3 will sell less than that. D3 appeals to much broader audience than SC2.
Yep D3 is the only real big Hack & Slash for yonks.