Encouraging start for next big MMO
As many as 300,000 customers filled servers on the Diablo 3 open beta over the weekend, a community manager at developer Blizzard Entertainment has claimed.
Micah Whiple revealed the promising numbers on his personal Twitter account, though did not reveal total user numbers.
Diablo 3, which has been in development at various stages across the past ten years, is due for release in North America and Europe on May 15th.
Debates surrounding the health of the MMO market has intensified in recent months, with the genre’s frontrunner – World of Warcraft – unable to prevent a systemic loss to its user base.
Star Wars the Old Republic, developed by Electronic Arts studio BioWare, is said to be serving fewer and fewer concurrent users at peak hours. The publisher claims, however, that its overall subscriber base is not in decline. In February it was said that about 1.7 million people had subscribed to the game.
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I would just like to clarify that Diablo 3 isn't an MMO but rather, it has several elements hosted on servers to stop cheating and to allow for the Online auction house. Although the game does require to be connected through Battle.net at all times to play it is still first and foremost a single player experience with the ability to share your adventure with up to 4 other players through an intuitive match making system, this is quite far from what I would define as an MMO.
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