Blizzard’s launch of Diablo 3 earlier this year wasn’t the company’s finest hour. Admitting that the game had faults, Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime says that the company would’ve handled things very differently had they correctly predicted what gamers wanted out of the title.
“Oh, there are definitely things we would do differently,” he said in an interview with GI.biz, “It would be so helpful in advance to know how many people are going to want to play a game. Because we could plan things out a lot better: we can make sure we have enough capacity, we can buy the hardware that we need.”
The game’s servers were overburdened by millions of users who had attempted, and failed, to log on within the first couple of weeks—an outage that prevented many from enjoying the game as much as they could’ve having gotten their hands on it.
“The Diablo III launch exceeded out forecasts by an order of magnitude,” he added, “we were very far off. We outsold our full-year forecast in the matter of a week. I have to give our team some credit because they scrambled really quickly and they were able to increase capacity everywhere within a couple of weeks. But the first couple of weeks were a little bit painful and so I would love to do that over again.”
Morhaime said that the game’s stress tests were not enough to predict how many people were actually going to play the game.
“We ran an open beta where we let anyone in the world in who wanted to play the game for free for a weekend. But a lot of people were waiting for the release of the game so we really didn’t have the indication that our forecasts would be off by so much.”
In hindsight, the number of World of Warcraft players who signed up for the Annual Pass, which provided them with a free copy of Diablo 3, should’ve been an indicator for how many players they could’ve been expecting to see at the very least.
