It's a mystery how Blizzard then went on to release the failure Diablo 3 is.
In a way the Diablo 3 RMAH helped validate the modern freemium/gacha business model for mobile platforms.
D3 was given away for free with a year subscription to WoW at the time which skewed the numbers a bit too.
That said, the fact that they rebuilt the absolute core gameplay loop - loot collection - to incorporate a real-money auction house, and had to roll it back, speaks volumes. Business-people do not abandon a monetization strategy unless it's proving to be costly in unintended ways.
RoS sold pretty well. (2.7m in first week: https://web.archive.org/web/20140530093934/http://www.euroga...)
But since RoS is an expansion, rather than a sequel, it's fair to ask whether that's apples to oranges. I don't actually know.
They decided no with D3, as did I (I played D2 for probably 7 years...)
How else would you judge a piece of art besides "I personally didn't like it?"
It would be seriously lame to like a game just because it made money or some critic told you to.
You also need to shrink the amount of D3 sales to compare it to D1/D2 sales because the game market has grown wildly since they released. Then adjust that because it was a sequel a decade in the making.
It's like comparing the star wars sequels to the original films. The nominal values are way bigger, but if you adjust them for inflation they might tell a different story.
This article[0] claims Blizzards overall MAU was close to flat YoY-Q4 2016-2017, knowing that Overwatch and Hearthstone are hitting records high MAU, while overall MAU is flat means that the other games (D3, SC2, HotS) are losing players.
It's a success in the way Matrix Revolutions was a success, massively profitable[1] yet a disappointment to fans (see diablo 3 fan ratings[2]).
[0] https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/08/blizzards-monthly-active-...
[1] https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Matrix-Revolutions-The#tab...
That's an arbitrary statement. The only relevant metric is revenue outside of whatever bars you would like to matter. Over time, units sold is a poor return and D3 was disappointing against every prediction beyond units sold. It was a disaster, in comparison to the recurring success of PoE.
This metric doesn't really make sense for a (mostly) single player game like Diablo. Once the player has finished the game they're unlikely to return. For a game released six years ago of course we would expect the current active player base to be very small - most of them have since moved on to other games.
I think the problem is that Diablo at launch was a test bed for some of their other properties so it ended up with some bad ideas. The RMAH (for example) was a bad idea, but it helped to point them to the right direction in their F2P and other monitizing approaches. The way they handle auto-generated maps and monsters is used quite a bit in the changes they've made to WoW as well as some of their talent choices.
I think for alot of hard core RPG fans, Elder Scrolls and other similar titles do a better job of hitting the sweet spot as they support alot more long term character growth and have a bigger world. But Diablo 3 is still great for people who want to just beat up some pixels and enjoy a little gothic storytelling.
And just to double down on my unpopular opinion, Diablo 1 was the best game in the franchise.
That is a bold statement, but I am inclined to agree. Obviously D2 is bigger, prettier, has more varied classes, more items, more everything. I absolutely adore that game, and I have spend hundreds and hundreds of hours playing it.
But the original... It just has that darker and more grim, less cartoons tone. Plus it came out when I was 10 years old, which obviously influences my opinion a lot.
I was 9. It's one of my favorite games ever. I lost interest in D2 pretty quickly, but I still come back to D1 every few years. I made my wife play it too and after about an hour she was hooked and became inseparable from the computer until beating the game a week or two later.
The season 14 tier ranking video has 350k views in 2 weeks[0], which is great considering patch 2.6 is essentially 3 seasons old now and RoS is several years old.
Now I'm picturing a statue of limitations though. Maybe ye old roman style, with the words around the base. :D
In fact, I think of that whenever I hear 'statute of limitations'.
[0]: https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062651235/blood-sweat-and-...
(yes, I'm salty that I played through a huge chunk of a single-player campaign chasing "prophecies" in what had previously been a sci-fi setting, even if it was 50s psionics sci-fi).