Diablo III is officially the Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows of video games! That’s not to say that you’ll recover three mystical artifacts on a journey to kill Ralph Fiennes whilst dungeon crawling. (You might though. Blizzard are sneaky like that.) No, the two now share the distinction of being the most pre-ordered items in their respective mediums to ever hit Amazon.com. Potter snagged the title for books back in 2007 and now Diablo III has earned that distinction for PC games.
Funny enough, the games that Diablo III beat out for the title are actually close relatives of the game. Previous record holders are Blizzard’s 2010 titles StarCraft II and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. The lesson here is that people are nutty about Blizzard games.
The weird part of this announcement is that it further highlights how bizarre the PC retail business has become. There are hundreds of thousands of people who actually have Diablo III in their possession right now. The game was downloaded from the Internet to their computers and it’s sitting there, locked away. They can’t play it until May 15th, which also happens to be the day that Amazon can send out hundreds of thousands of boxes with the game inside it.
If publishers are going to let people download the software, why not let them play it? Why not bar them from downloading it until the box release day?
Mystifying.
I believe the reason for letting us download the game before Tuesday is the same reason why they’ll let us install it and patch it on Monday: to avoid clogs on the server on launch day. If everyone had to download a 10+GB game on the same day at the same time it would definitely crash the servers, worst than it will be on Tuesday when everyone logs in at 12:00 sharp.
LIES LIES ALL LIES, LIER LIER LIER. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! BEGONE, THE POWER OF CRIST COMPELS YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GET THAT THING AWAY FROM ME!!!!!!!
i assume you refer to my statement about the servers crashing on tuesday… i hope to God, Tyrael and even Cain’s nephew that I’m wrong and that Blizzard pulls an epic one and keeps all servers stable… i really do…
But we’re talking about more than half a million people login in…
Games are in their finished “gold” state at least a couple of weeks before they hit retail. We used to have to wait for the discs to be made, but with pretty much every current PC game (and a lot of older ones) being available for download, why do we have to wait?
My guess it is tied to retail. Maybe these companies have contracts with retail distributors to wait until the games are available on the shelves to avoid damaging retail sales too much?