And look who made more money? It was a tie!
Was it? There’s a very recent infographic from Larian, and if you cross reference one or two of those stats against achievement data, it looks like they maybe sold about 10M copies. That’s lower than I was expecting, but that’s what my math says. Not only did Diablo IV sell more copies at the same price, but there were also more opportunities for them to sell post-launch stuff in Diablo.
Estimates put it around 13 million sales on Steam alone. Say another 5 million from console sales combined to a guesstimate around 18 million.
The estimates I saw were around $650M for each. Maybe that doesn’t count post-launch DLC.
It’s also raw revenue rather than net profit (I guarantee Blizzard had an advertising budget orders of magnitude larger than Larian) so it’s very possible Larian kept more of what it made.
They are in the same ballpark in terms of successful game making, however you slice it. Both could make an argument for why their model of development worked and why this proves doing things their way is the best method for making money.
