20 | October | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

I have to admit any time I show a bit of interest in Diablo IV something happens to wave me off. Not that I pay extremely close attention to the title. I think the success of Diablo II Resurrected filled my every five year need to revisit the franchise. But I do keep an eye on it, if only by virtue of the fact that I keep an eye on Blizzard in general.

Diablo IV

So I did catch the news that Diablo IV was being released on Steam. You can find it there now, and it is even 25% off until October 24th.

Now on Steam

Not that there was much news to catch. It was a pretty low key launch. You would have to dig a bit to find where Blizzard even mentioned the fact. It certainly isn’t on the Diablo IV web page under the news heading or anything.

In fact, the first actual bit of news I saw was a mention of the completely predictable outcome of Blizzard putting the game on Steam; it was being review bombed.

Mixed reviews

I feel like I need to repeat that this was completely predictable.

I will grant you that the situation is not as bad as Overwatch 2, which was a reflection of how poorly Blizzard handled that situation. People are not going out of their way to slam Diablo IV… though it is also not a free to play title anybody can download and review either.

Overwatch 2 on Steam… 9% favorable

And the Diablo IV situation has gotten marginally better. Since I took that screen shot the number of reviews has almost doubled and the favorable reviews have climbed all the way up to… 53% of the total. Better, but still not great.

This was, and I cannot commit to this being the last time I say this, completely predictable… so much so that back in August after the Overwatch 2 fiasco, I was pretty sure that Blizzard would put off moving any more titles to Steam. I was clearly wrong.

Which leaves me at a bit of a loss to explain why Blizzard would do this.

This Steam launch didn’t get the trumpets blaring press announcement, the title is only a few months old so we’re not really into the zone where a game goes to Steam to try and pick up some incremental revenue… usually by way of a deep discount come the holidays.

I mean, we had the announcement that Diablo IV was the fastest selling title in Blizzard history, earning $666 million in just five days. What was the motivation to bring it to Steam in light of its current controversies and the memory of how Overwatch 2 was received?

For me there is no logical reason to do this… unless it was something to do with the Microsoft acquisition.

In addition to having to make all sorts of flimsy promises about how they won’t make Call of Duty an XBox exclusive, it is quite possible that they feel the need to not look entirely monopolistic when it comes to the Microsoft Store built into Windows 10 and 11.

Microsoft went kind of big on their built-in store in Windows 10, no doubt trying to fulfill a long time wet dream to get a cut of all software revenue for their operating system. Also, they saw Apple do it and there isn’t anything Apple can do that Microsoft won’t try to do in a tangibly worse way. Apple can get away with that because it is a niche player [edit: In the PC operating system market] relative to Microsoft, and because it didn’t go completely hard core and try to drive people to its store for everything.

And I am not even going to start digging into the XBox game app store thing in Windows, which short of having to listen to Tim Sweeney speak (read: lie) about anything, is one of the biggest reasons to use Steam.

So I wonder if this is a bit more of Microsoft trying to show it plays nice with competitors, even competing software store fronts, even video game store fronts that go head to head with their own XBox store front.

Or maybe this is Bobby’s revenge. I don’t know. But Diablo IV is up there on Steam and things are playing out in a… once again… completely predictable way.