Diablo IV officially releases tomorrow, but those with the Ultimate Edition have early access and have been at it since June 2. The open-world, demon-slaying action RPG, already carrying unreal hype, has shot up the viewership rankings and proved to be a massive success on platforms like Twitch.
Diablo IV is currently the biggest game on Twitch
This Blizzard Entertainment offering from the legendary franchise has taken over the streaming landscape over the past few days, proving that the expectations placed upon it were justified. Since June 2, it has been the most watched and popular title by a mile, with its Hours Watched numbers being 47% better than the next best entry.
Even its Peak Viewers count was almost 38% higher than the second most popular name, Just Chatting. The rest of the list contained the usual suspects, although Street Fighter 6 being in the seventh spot is worth a mention, as it too has climbed up the charts after a late April release.
Diablo IV has caught the attention of some of the biggest content creators across the globe, and rightly so. It has proved to be an astute and fitting sequel to the first three games, with an open-world structure replacing the usual chapter-based progression, thus making it more interesting and adding a lot of activities to do.
This has meant that the likes of shroud, Rubius, and Asmongold have been playing the title a lot over the past three days. jessirocks leads the list of channels in terms of airtime with a mammoth 71+ hours, which was 54% more than the first-placed shroud.
That Asmongold, one of the biggest RPG gaming creators worldwide today, made the top ten with just seven hours of airtime shows just how popular he is. Of course, he made a name for himself with his gameplay and knowledge of World of Warcraft, another hugely successful Blizzard offering, alongside other MMORPGs, so his name was always likely to pop up regardless of audience size and broadcast time.
Another metric where Diablo IV was head and shoulders above the competition was peak channels, with the game doing 175% better than the next-best game, Fortnite. That the latter still enjoys this much popularity among broadcasters more than half a decade after its release speaks volumes of Epic Games’ ability to keep it engaging and changing with the times.
Again, the other names on this list are an amalgamation of the who’s who of the video gaming world today. Another title that continues to be streamed on numerous channels is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, which continues to fly the flag high for this classic FPS series despite recent releases not satisfying fans and pundits enough.
Diablo IV did some monster numbers across the first three days of its early access release, including 941K Peak Viewers, which was just slightly lower than the count from its first beta test, which was 942K PV. The highest of these values helped it to make it to the list of 20 most popular games ever on the purple platform.
This also points to the wave of fans waiting for years to get their hands on the game; after all, they got their first glimpse of the series’ fourth installment four years back during Blizzcon 2019, where the resurrection of Lilith, the new big bad demon of the franchise, was displayed.
As expected, English was the most dominant language to watch the game’s streams in, doing over 400% better than the next-best entry, Korean. In fact, German was the only other language to hit the double-digit mark for viewership share, proving that the game was sought-after among a diverse bunch of fans across the world.
With the official release happening tomorrow, Diablo IV has only one way to go, and that’s up. As more and more people get access to the game starting June 6, the viewership stats will evolve, with an expected increase in the watch time total but perhaps a fall in the peak concurrent viewership, but it will be intriguing to see whether the title finishes in the top five at the end of the month.
