Diablo 4 brings in a lot of money. Of course, that’s not surprising in itself, as the game set a new record for Blizzard with sales of $666 million when it launched last year. but. Fifteen months later, does this momentum continue?
According to people familiar with the matter, the answer is yes!
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As GamesPress reports, senior product manager Harrison Froeschke revealed on his (now deleted) LinkedIn profile that Diablo 4 has generated over $1 billion in revenue since launch. This number covers all revenue generated by the game, including sales, battle pass purchases, microtransactions, and more.
However, when it comes to smaller transactions, the deal amounted to over $150 million. According to Froeschke’s since-deleted post, this number primarily covers everything from virtual currency to store bundles, general discounts, pricing, and even personalized discounts.
It’s hard to gauge how high microtransaction revenue is based on this number alone. Publishers rarely break down revenue by source, but $150 million is still a lot of money, accounting for 15% of Diablo 4’s $1 billion total revenue.
Diablo 4’s microtransactions have long been criticized by players for being expensive. Given the overhead perspective of the game’s camera, the perceived value of these cosmetics is significantly reduced when you compare them to something like Fortnite skins. However, they are about the same price, if not more expensive.
Blizzard has also been criticized for selling bundled simple color swa[s and other minor effects for a lot of money. That is all particularly frustrating considering the game does not award players any of the paid currency through play. Even the battle pass, when purchased and fully completed, doesn’t offer enough Platinum to buy the next one, or really anything in the in-game store.
Given all that success, it’s fair say the experiment of turning Diablo 4 into Call of Duty has worked out well for Activision Blizzard, so you should only expect the microtransactions train to continue.
