Two Million People Tried Out The Diablo III Beta
If you remember, a couple of weeks ago we wrote about how for one short, glorious weekend, the Diablo III beta was open and available to anybody who wanted to try it out. During that time period, Blizzard’s Community Manager Micah Whipple estimated that around 300,000 people were online playing the demo at one time. He never did give us a final number, only estimating that it was “a lot”.
Well, it turns out that “a lot” is equal to two million people, as Blizzard President Michael Morhaime revealed during Activision’s annual earnings call. The original Diablo sold around 2.5 million copies. The fact that a beta earned about the same number of players compared to the original game is astounding, and just goes to show how much bigger games have gotten over the last decade.
Diablo III will be released next week on the 15th. While Blizzard is having official release parties in only a few locations around the world, many different local game stores will be opening at midnight, allowing you to get your copy of the game as soon as humanly possible. Sadly, Blizzard will not be allowing you to play your copy of the game until 3:01 EST, so if you’re like me, you’ll be forced to wait 3 long hours until the servers go online. Oh well, at least you’ll have plenty of time to play with the stuff you got in your Collector’s Edition, right?
