Diablo 4 has surpassed a whopping $666 million in revenue in just five days since its worldwide launch on June 6, breaking internal sales records for its publisher, Blizzard Entertainment revealed today.
Rod Fergusson, Diablo general manager and Blizzard senior vice president, told the New York Times that at least some of the initial success of the game has to be attributed to the game’s marketing.
“We were really trying to reach the younger audience,” Fergusson said, also saying that the company was less worried about securing the purchases of older fans compared to new entrants to the franchise, according to the NY Times report. “If you’re paying attention, you can see it in our marketing,” Fergusson said.
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Diablo 4’s marketing has indeed been quite noticeable, including a trailer featuring a Billie Eilish song, a Twitter campaign starring Megan Fox, and a theme song by Halsey and SUGA from K-Pop supergroup BTS.
There’s even been cross-promotion in another one of Activision-Blizzard’s titles, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where players were greeted with an ad starring Lilith when they logged on for some multiplayer matches on Diablo’s launch day.
Blizzard also revealed a number of fun statistics from the game’s first week, including revealing that players have died over 317 million times (5.8 million of which are from the Butcher alone), and 166 million parties created by players joining up with each other.
In any case, it appears the marketing has been working, but word of mouth must be working as well. Diablo 4 has reviewed exceptionally well, boasting an 87 aggregate review score on MetaCritic.
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And with all of those sales has come players grinding the game hard ever since they got their hands on it, as Diablo players have logged over 276 million hours in the game since it released.
