Blizzard loses 42% of its players in just 6 months

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Activision Blizzard presented the financial report for the second quarter of 2023, which ended on June 30th. For game developer Blizzard, the 3 months were all about the release of Diablo 4: The sales figures have risen sharply, but the number of players has continued to fall despite the big release. Compared to the quarter that ended December 31, 2022, almost every 2nd player from back then is gone.

How does Blizzard measure its player count?

  • Blizzard speaks of “MAU” – the monthly active user.
  • A human can count as multiple “MAU” when logging into different games. Anyone who plays Diablo 4, WoW and Overwatch 2 in a month counts as “3 MAU” for that month.
  • To count as MAU, it is enough to log into a game once: The MAU value of a quarter is created by Activision Blizzard taking the MAU of the 3 months, adding them up and then dividing this value by 3.

    • Diablo 4 shows gameplay trailer for Season 1 and some players make fun of it

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    Blizzard’s player base falls from 45 million to 26 million

    How have the player numbers developed? Half a year ago, in Q4 2022, Blizzard had its highest value in years: there you had 45 million MAU. This high number was apparently due to the release of Overwatch 2 and the WoW expansion Dragonflight.

    But already in the first quarter of 2023, the number of players had dropped significantly and dropped to 27 million.

    Now one could assume that the release of Diablo 4 stopped the downward trend, but the opposite is the case: In Q2 2023, the number of MAU fell to 26 million. This means that Blizzard has 42% fewer players than was reported half a year ago.

    Activision Blizzard player numbers.

    Why is Diablo 4 not so noticeable in the statistics? The release of Diablo 4 on June 5th came statistically at a bad time. Because this is how the MAU only counts for the month of June. They therefore only make up a third of the statistics.

    Also, it doesn’t matter that people played Diablo 4 a lot, because someone who looks into the game for 2 minutes counts as much as a player who is active for 200 hours.

    Above all, the hype surrounding Overwatch 2 has dropped significantly

    Why did Blizzard lose so many players? There are 3 aspects:

    Despite fewer players, Blizzard has record sales thanks to Diablo 4

    Is Diablo 4 a success?? Yes, that’s what it looks like. Blizzard more than doubled its revenue compared to the previous quarter. It went from $443 million to $1.058 billion.

    The talk is that over 10 million players played Diablo 4 in June and invested more than 700 million hours.

    While Q2 2023 was the weakest quarter in terms of players since Q1 2022, it was Blizzard’s strongest revenue quarter in a long time.

    Blizzard manages to make more money with fewer players.

    Even with Diablo 4, the mood is currently threatening to change:

    “Game fun was reduced by 95%” – Diablo 4 receives bad criticism after patch for Season 1

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