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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

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senko·

Moderate success?

Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 were considered massive successes and all predate WoW.

That's like saying Google had moderate success with search but hit gold with Gmail

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Not to mention that since WoW, Diablo 3, Hearthstone, and Overwatch have been massive successes. (I'm pretty sure SC2 sold well, but not as much as these other ones.) I can't think of another studio that has such a consistent commercial and critical track record.

Calling D3 a "massive success" is blowing it out of proportion. It got game of the year in 2012. It hasn't lost enough money to be shut down but not quite enough to get the love it needs to be better than release. Path of Exile has been a massive success, in contrast.

Estimates of Diablo III + the expansion (a $40 retail at launch) put it around 20m copies. That is a massive success IMHO.

Diablo 3 + expansions is the 12th best selling video game of all time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

That list plays with numbers in very interesting ways that aren't very useful. Not counting digital sales (uniformly), you end up with stats from an arena that doesn't really apply anymore. Notice LoL isn't on the wiki or Kritika Online or any of the actual massive successes (active users or net profit or ARPU) in the industry.

IIRC, it was the fastest selling pc game of all time. That's quite a success.

Those games were all big fish in their markets, but they weren't the money printing machine WoW was. I don't remember the numbers, but they skewed heavily toward the MMO. That's why every studio came out with its own MMO in the years that followed.

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