The scores start dropping, and they don't stop dropping...

Never stop never stopping, D4!

 

That... is a mostly negative response from players.

And, yes, some of them are still raging about the game's not-so-microtransactions, and Blizzard's greed, but a lot of those low scores are fairly detailed, well-reasoned critiques of the game itself. It seems that a lot of people are seeing the same issues with the game that I saw.

And all of the most useful reviews of the game are negative. If you sort the reviews to surface the ones rated most useful by other users, they're all red.

 

I feel very seen right now.

Sorted by most useful, the first neutral review is this one from the middle of page 2:

There are positive reviews, of course, but... yeah... Diablo IV seems to have achieved exactly what I previously described as its worst case for a reception. 

• Critical response was largely rapturous, but players are bitterly divided, with most user-reviewers rating the game negatively. 
• User-reviewers are claiming to be withholding constructive criticisms to give 10/10 scores, just to counter the negativity, so even those 10/10 ratings are not indicative of satisfied customers.
• Blizzard is making claims about this being their best-selling game at launch ever*, but aren't actually giving the sales figure that goes with that sales claim, leading me to suspect that they've redefined the word "sale" again. Shenanigans!

Overall, the signal Blizzard are receiving is so mixed, so muddled, and partly by Blizzard themselves, that they don't know how D4 is landing, or why, which will absolutely hamstring their attempts to plot a course forwards. 

And while the stench of Diablo Immortal clearly lingers (a lot of negative reviews were rants about Blizzard's greed, monetization practices that aren't confirmed yet, accusations of bribed reviewers, and negative sentiment towards Blizzard as a whole, rather than D4 specifically) a lot of the negative reviews really are pointing at serious core design problems... which the D4 dev team will likely not be given time or budget to properly address, since doing so would mean acknowledging them. Which Blizzard are clearly not planning to do, since they've already declared victory here.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

Yeah...  I have a feeling that Diablo is not going to be reclaiming the ARPG throne anytime soon. Just saying.

 

* Oh, yeah! About that sales claim...

(Yes, it's another footnote, don't @ me!)

Diablo III was Blizzard's previous fastest-selling-at-launch game, claiming 3.5 million in pre-orders and first-day sales. That number has an asterisk on it, though: it includes 1.5 million World of WarCraft subscribers who received D3 for free when pre-paying for a year of WoW, something they were likely planning to do anyway. Annual passes for WoW were, and still are, cheaper than paying month-to-month, assuming you've already decided to pay for the whole year anyway, so there players effectively got D3 for free for having saved money on their WoW habits.

You can argue that these are still sales, since money flowed from customers to Blizzard, and Diablo III licences flowed back, and that might be fair. In fact, I've previously said that was fair... but there's another way to look at those 1.5 million units of D3 "sales." You could decide, years later, that they weren't actually sales at all, but rather a write-off -- an expense associated with cross-promoting both games, which can't really be tied to either game with 100% certainty.

Hypothetically speaking, then, if Blizzard were to decide, years after the fact, to reclassify those units as not really sales at all... if they were, say, to limit the definition of "sale" to explicit sales: clear, one-to-one associations of  customer payments to single, specific game licenses, then Diablo III suddenly didn't "sell" 3.5 million copies by the end of its launch day, did it? It only "sold" 2 million, while giving away 1.5 million as a cross-promotional write-off which is partly attributed to World of WarCraft.

Now, beating the record is easy. You only need sales in the 2 to 2.5 million range. Which would be right in line with my earlier guesstimate. Which, remember, would indicate that Diablo IV failed to grow the Diablo franchise's player base at all, in spite of the best efforts of a sycophantic gaming media.

And, if you compare the two games' metacritic pages, that would make a certain amount of sense.

That, my friends, is history, repeating.