With around 1700000 hours watched on Twitch in the past 7 days, is Diablo 4 dying?

There was a lot of hype surrounding Diablo 4 during its beta stages and even after the game went live. However, players soon started facing frequent disconnections and crashes. While these problems were still minor, more issues started cropping up as the days went by, ranging from bugs and errors to players’ use of blatant exploits to get an upper hand in the game.

Diablo 4 is still popular as a title primarily because of the fact that Blizzard Entertainment is actually listening to feedback from players and is trying to implement changes based on it. With that said, is the game truly dying?

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Diablo 4 may soon find itself sandwiched between hell and high waters

The Diablo 4 peak viewer count has seen a considerable drop (Screenshot by Sportskeeda via Twitch Tracker)

Considering that Diablo 4 is just in its first season, there's still some wiggle room for Blizzard when it comes to experimenting with gameplay elements. However, if the same issues continue in subsequent seasons, the game might die out even before it grows to its fullest potential.

While Blizzard doesn't release official stats with respect to the number of active players too often, there are a few third-party sites that consistently keep track of it. The accuracy of these stats is currently unclear, but they do provide some idea about how the title has been performing lately.

First and foremost, when it comes to player count, there's a great website known as activeplayer.io. According to the stats there, Diablo 4 has averaged at around 400,000 players in the past 30 days. It should be noted that the Season of the Malignant patch 1.1.0 went live within this time frame.

While the player count has dropped significantly, the current number is fairly high (Screenshot by Sportskeeda via activeplayers.io)

This patch rendered the game unplayable because of the immense number of nerfs that it brought. Following this update, the title did see a sharp decline in its player count. Almost everyone took to social media sites like Reddit and Twitter to talk about how problematic the patch was.

Blizzard promptly responded, and within two weeks, deployed a patch that undid most of the nerfs. Although there are more patches in store for the title, the developer promised not to launch any more updates like that one.

Stats on the Diablo 4 Twitch Tracker page provide further insight into the viewership of the game. June 2023 saw a staggering rise in the viewtime primarily because the title went live that month.

The numbers declined in July 2023 despite even more people having access to the game. The notorious 1.1.0 patch also went live during this month, thereby reducing the number of active players and, in turn, the number of people who actively watched Diablo 4 Twitch streams.

The peak viewership dropped in August 2023 as well, but considering that there's still some time left this month, the numbers should go up soon. This decline could be attributed to the Baldur's Gate 3 release. The game's rise to popularity was rather unexpected, so it did manage to eat into Diablo 4's view time.

The current viewership count of the game on Twitch (Screenshot by Sportskeeda via Twitch Tracker)

However, here's what's even more interesting about these stats. Based on the information on the Twitch Tracker page, the average number of viewers in the past seven days stands at 9713, but the average number of hours watched in the past week stands at 1,625,359 hours. These numbers hint at the possibility of Blizzard's RPG becoming a niche title.

Although the number of players has seen a considerable decline, it would be wrong to say that the game is dying, at least at this point. However, in order for the title to survive, Blizzard will have to deliver a strong second season without repeating the mistakes they made in the first one.