Diablo III Is The Fastest Selling PC Game Ever
Diablo III is a big deal. People have been dreaming of this game for years, and have stood by patiently as the years rolled on, waiting for the next jaunt in the world of Sanctuary. So, when I say that Diablo III sold 3.5 million copies in its first 24 hours, it’s not a total surprise.
Still, though, 3.5 million is a lot. Especially in the first 24 hours. Diablo II was a successful game, but it had only sold 4 million copies by August of 2001, a full year after its release. That 3.5 million number doesn’t even count the 1.2 million copies of Diablo III that were given to people as part of the WoW Yearly Pass, which makes Diablo III the biggest PC game launch in history, according to Blizzard.
With those facts in mind, it’s no wonder that Blizzard had a problem that first day or two keeping their servers up and running! When Blizzard had the open beta weekend a few weeks before the release 2 million people were online that weekend, with about 300,000 people playing at the same time at one point. With the release of the full game, it’s likely that you saw millions of people all trying to log on to the same servers at the same time. While some people will say Blizzard should have figured that they were going to get so many people online at once, I do think it’s hard to fault Blizzard for the problems they had on launch day, especially since it seems that the servers are running much more smoothly now.
