Sure you guys want to take a pitchfork and torch to Blizzard for servers going down on launch night of Diablo 3, but I’m hoping that these figures help to explain the situation a little better. Honestly, do you build servers? Do you know how to work internet dark magics? Probably not. So have a heart when I tell you 3.5 million people assaulted Diablo 3 servers with a demon slaying fervor that just toppled the machines for a few hours. Diablo 3 is easily poised to be the biggest PC release of the year with sales totals for the first week hitting well over 6 million copies.
Alot of the first night traffic can also be attributed to the WOW annual pass that when purchased nets you a free downloadable copy of Diablo 3. I think theres maybe a few people that play World of Warcraft right? Maybe a couple? A couple of hundred million? Yeah. So how about we cut some slack to Blizzard because I don’t think anybody could have handled that. Or maybe the forces of Hell descended that night to take out the servers so the players couldn’t invade and wreck Hell’s fortress or something. I don’t know. I’ve got to go play Diablo.. because the servers are fine now.
You know, if the success of Diablo 3 came as some kind of surprise to everyone, I could understand them being woefully unprepared to handle the traffic that came their way. But they hyped this game like crazy. They made the deal with the WoW annual pass. They knew the pre-order numbers. They designed it to effectively be a heavily instanced MMO, and therefore server intensive. They had no reason to not know the surge was coming. And yet, they were completely unprepared. They either bit off far more than they could chew, or they simply just didn’t care enough to provide the backend support necessary to make their product reasonably functional. It’s not like they don’t have experience in handling large numbers of players given that they run WoW. And the fact that Diablo 3 issues resulted in the entirety of Battle.net going down, thus making all the other current Blizzard titles unplayable, is something that simply never should have happened. This was a terrible launch, even by Blizzard’s already low launch standards.
On a tangentially connected side note: I learned recently that Battle.net passwords aren’t case sensitive. It’s not totally security-breaking, but the cost of coding effort plus reduced security for no apparent benefit does leave one scratching one’s head.
This was a well written article. I’m no gamer but I enjoyed reading this. Spot on sir.
Kevin,
In retrospect yeah I agree with you that Blizzard should have been more prepared for this launch and honestly if the whole “have to be online to play singleplayer” thing wasn’t in the game than it would be alot less of an issue. When the servers are down or your internet is out (which comcast is ALOT in my area) than Diablo 3 is just gonna be collecting dust. Blizzard did drop the ball on that big time.
They make awesome games though.. and through all of my pissing and moaning I still pretty much have to say SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY BLIZZARD