[citation][nom]balister[/nom]That's fairly bad however. 500 MP games means 2000 people in a game at any given time. If they sold 10 Million copies, this means they're running only 2 hundredths of a percent (0.02%) of their total sales and the way D3 was setup, they were s'posed to be making revenues from the RMAH. If only 2k people are playing at any given time, that's pretty damn lackluster.And lets face it, Bretik wasn't far off the mark when he said that the present Blizzard people would end up failing. If only 0.02% of the total sales are still playing regularly after 6 months, and you compare that to the number of people that played Diablo and Diablo 2 up till recently, that's abyssmal with what the new team has done compared to the old team (that are now all over the place between Arena Net for GW and GW 2, Runic for TL and TL2, and even those that created Hellgate: London which ultimately failed as well).[/citation]
What I personally do not get is why people feel the need to hold Blizzard to such a high standard compared to the rest of the developers out there. Sure D3 has it issues, and you seem confident that your argument has credit, but it does not.
Your assessment of D3 based on your rudimentary math to determine the number of people still playing it is a red herring. It doesn't matter how many people are still playing it because Blizzard does not draw income from D3 on monthly subscriptions.
You are making an argument based on a standard that you are only applying to Diablo 3. In fact, the only reason you are able to make this argument is because it requires an Online connection to play, therefor Blizzard shares minimum information about how many people are playing.
Diablo 3 is not a subscription MMO, It is a one time purchase to play game. Every game that gets released that does not have a subscription attached to it suffers the same drop of in player base that happened in Diablo 3 yet would you call every person who has developed a game that became somewhat irrelevant 6-9 months after its release a failure?
I got my 300-350 hours out of Diablo 3; I do not play it much anymore but that is fine. I don't play Skyrim much anymore (120 Hours); I probably wont play Assassin Creed III (51 hours) anymore after getting getting the Platinum Trophy, I haven't touched Borderlands 2 in a month, I haven't played Arkham City in months, I haven't Played Max Payne 3 in months. I have about 130 PS3 games sitting on a shelf that I have beaten and played and will probably never play them again.
Does that make every one of those companies a failure because I am not playing their games any longer even though I bought them?