Activision-Blizzard didn’t want to make a big fuss about it, but the gaming world was always going to. Tucked away two hours deep into anofficial Developer Update on YouTube,Diablo 4’s Associate Director of Community quietly announced that the game would be coming to Steam, muttering something about ‘bringing more Diablo players into the world’ and how fun it’d be on Steam Deck before swiftly moving on.
It’s kind of telling that they gavethe Steam launch so little air time, when in reality it’s probably big enough news that it could’ve come close to the start of the whole stream (right after they unveiled details about Diablo 4’s second season, Season of Blood). The stream has been viewed by around 140,000 people these past 24 hours, and has a somewhat ropey 60/40 Like/Dislike ratio—not great figures for a game that made a solid first impression and was all the talk of the gaming town when it launched back in June.
Since time immemorial, publishers have desperately been trying to break themselves away from the Steam ecosystem, yet always seem to come crawling back in the end. Famously, when EA brought its online shooters to Steam, both Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 enjoyed a massive renaissance that endures to this day. Ubisoft has also succumbed to the allure of Steam, bringing its biggest games to the platform in recent years.
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But there’s no question that when publishers with their autonomous storefront ambitions bring their games to Steam, it’s something of a capitulation, an acknowledgement that despite only getting 70% of each game sold instead of 100%, it’s a worthwhile hit to take given the incomparably massive audience that game reaches. The only platform that seemsreallydetermined for its games to stay off Steam is the Epic Games Store, but, well,that whole ‘Steam Competitor’ project really isn’t going so well.
For Acti-Blizz to do this withDiablohowever, is a bit of a surprise at this point. While some of their games have been on Steam for a while (whileOverwatch 2 arrived on Steam last month to a terrible reception) this is the first time a Diablo game has come to Steam, and for it to arrive a mere four months after its initial launch is a tad bit troubling. With word on the street being that Season 1 was a bit of a flop, and withan unthinkable number of high-profile RPGscoming out mere months later to steal away the attention the game’s been getting in the press and on streaming platforms, Diablo 4 faces a bit of a rut after its strong start.
From a gamer’s perspective, Diablo 4 coming to Steam is great news of course. Native Steam Deck support without having to faff around with extra launchers, easy communication and linking-up with friends, in-home streaming to different devices, and all the other joyous features that for some reason these supposed Steam alternatives just can’t seem to grasp, make it the best gaming platform experience out there.Yes, you can talk about how ‘competition’s good’ and other capitalist platitudes, but the reality is that thereisno competition to Steam, merely petty fragmentation of the PC gaming platform. The sooner Battle.net is out of the picture (when Microsoft gets their paws on Activision-Blizzard, presumably), the better.
There’s a big difference between, say, Sony bringing their triple-A games to PC a couple of years after release, or EA extending the lease of life for Titanfall 2 on Steam, and Acti-Blizz bringing Diablo 4 to Steam a mere four months on from its release. It sounds like a change of plan, a shift in strategy, and it’s not too hard to correlate it with murmurs that Diablo 4 isn’t sustaining the success its creators had hoped. From the player’s perspective, why not just bringallDiablo games to Steam? Well, because Diablo 4 is the only one that really matters from a business perspective right now.
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Clearly, Acti-Blizz is aware of issues like the thin endgame in Diablo 4, and is moving to address these in Season 2, such as by speeding up XP gain after Level 50 and adding in a bunch of new endgame bosses. That’s good, or it’s a start at least, but if Acti-Blizz is already looking to the Steam to bump up those Diablo 4 sales and player counts, then it’s a sure sign that they don’t believe the game has enough allure to get people to download the meagre Battle.net Launcher and play that way.
You might have thought that with Microsoft’s Acti-Blizz acquisition looming, Microsoft would want games like Diablo 4 to remain Battle.net-exclusive for now, so that they could become Game Pass-exclusive (on PC, at least) later. But in fairness to Microsoft, they’ve generally launched Day One games on Steam and Game Pass simultaneously, and the financial appeal of Diablo 4 is in cosmetics and sustained player numbers rather than actual sales of the game.
It’s testament to the dominance of Steam that all roads on PC seem to lead there sooner or later (and recently sooner rather than later), but Acti-Blizz can’t have been wanting to end up there so soon, even if Microsoft might eventually have other plans. Diablo 4 is not where Activision-Blizzard want it to be, but at least by being on Steam, it’s where gamers want it to be.
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