If Microsoft were playing the Pyramid Stage of yesterday’s Glastonbury of Games, Blizzard were Radiohead, showing up unannounced to steal the show from a tiny tea-tent. To mark Diablo 3’s first anniversary, the developers last night unveiled an infographic fit to burst with astonishingly large numbers. It transpires that 14.5 million unique players have passed through Sanctuary, and together racked up a total of 2.8 billion hours. That’s an average playtime of just over 193 hours each.
Diablo attracts 2.1m players daily on average. The total number of hours players spend in the game per day is 8.2m, or 930 years.
Of the 67.1 million characters created worldwide to date, most were wizards – though all five of the game’s classes are favoured to a more-or-less even degree by players. The barbarian has the edge in Hardcore.
Apparently 127 characters are created per minute. An impressive 12.7m of them have made it all the way to level 60.
And finally, 648,510,803,462,686 gold has been amassed in-game to date – that’s 9.7m per character. Curiously, only 15% of it came from in-game vendors – 84% was gleaned from the ground, and a further 0.7% from quest rewards.
I’ve travelled to all four corners of the internet, and I can tell you this: rare is the denizen with a nice word for Diablo 3 – least of all its creators. And yet here they are, the 14.5 million. The 2.1m who return every day, one year after a tumultuous launch. Make no mistake: Diablo is loved.
