Recent Twitch viewing figures suggest a huge decline in popularity for Diablo 4, which also indicates far lower concurrent players.

This is in stark contrast to the game’s extremely successful launch. It is one of Blizzard’s fastest-selling games of all time, with over 10 million players in Diablo 4’s launch month.

However, things seemed to steadily decline after a botched Season 1 release and questionable decisions regarding the game’s live-service element.

Below we look to delve into Diablo 4’s recent decline in popularity and what could have contributed to it.

Diablo 4 Concurrent Players

Recent data suggests that Diablo 4 has significantly reduced concurrent players. Since Diablo 4’s launch, the average daily viewers on Twitch have dropped by as much as 98%.

This is most likely due to fans being displeased with how Blizzard has handled Diablo 4’s live service, as well as the negative response to Season 1.

Reddit user UsualInitial was the first to report Diablo 4’s huge decline in average daily Twitch viewers (since edited to reflect accurate percentage decline):

UsualInitial used the third-party Twitch viewership tracking site SullyGnome to gather the data. At launch, Diablo 4 had a peak of 937,361 viewers on Twitch and has gone down to 24,702 as of August 9. That’s only 2.6% of Diablo 4’s original peak Twitch viewers on its early access launch day.

This huge decrease in Twitch viewership is not a good sign and suggests a huge decline in concurrent players for Diablo 4.

Although Blizzard does not divulge the stats of concurrent players, there are a variety of third-party websites that give estimated overviews of concurrent active players for Diablo 4.

ActivePlayer.io has reported a similar decline in Diablo 4’s players count, with a reported loss of 122,510 players in the last 30 days.

It’s important to note that all data gathered by ActivePlayer is estimated and should not be taken at face value.

Why is Diablo 4’s Concurrent Players Declining?

The number of concurrent players in Diablo 4 is most likely declining because of fans’ responses to Season 1. Season 1’s large 1.1 patch introduced a variety of nerfs and odd design choices that made the gameplay experience feel worse for many.

Diablo 4’s Season 1 launched to much fan criticism, mainly due to the huge nerfs and questionable balance changes to fan-favorite classes and builds.

The new content added with the Season of the Malignant also did not satisfy the player’s desire for more worthwhile content.

Many have felt that the new powers and the Malignant Tunnels did not do enough to compensate for the “boring” endgame.

Despite Diablo 4’s campaign receiving universal praise, many fans have had lots to say about what they disliked about the game in every other regard:

Despite this, Diablo 4 isn’t dead yet. Things are looking up for the game since Patch 1.1.1’s more positive re-balancing changes and streamlining of endgame content.

Hopefully, Blizzard will continue to listen to fan feedback and introduce more meaningful content for Season 2 and beyond.