By the looks of it, Activision Blizzard has a fair shot at occupying the top three spots on the worst-reviewed games on Steam list – Overwatch 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 already make-up two-thirds of the list.
As one-half of Blizzard Entertainment’s livestream showcase for Season of Blood, it revealed that a Diablo game will be available to play on Steam for the first time in franchise history.
According to Blizzard, Diablo 4 will arrive on Steam on October 17, right alongside the game’s next big update, which is hoping to bring players back by tweaking the loot drops and promising XP rewards, among others.
Diablo 4 is easily the best example of an incomplete game that was released too soon. Whereas Cyberpunk 2077 was a buggy and unoptimized mess, Diablo 4 lacked the content needed to sustain its historically significant launch. Despite initially requiring the use of Battle.net, Diablo 4 saw millions of players log on every day on multiple platforms – until they all stopped playing. These days, Diablo 4 is hanging out on the cellars of Twitch alongside Diablo 2: Resurrected and Diablo 3, which isn’t what you would want from a game that, earlier this year, legitimately generated GOTY talks.
According to Associate Director of Community, Adam Fletcher, Diablo 4’s arrival on Steam will feature cross-play and cross-progression. It’s live now on Steam if you’d like to check it out.
Just like how opening the gates of hell puts Sanctuary at risk of being run over by hellish hordes, Blizzard’s bold move to put Diablo 4 on Steam will likely meet a similar fate.
The Diablo 4 community cares little for the game these days. It’s officially labeled as a dead game and is at least a few seasons away from becoming what it should’ve been at launch – and that’s assuming that the subsequent updates trend positively, which hasn’t happened yet.
With Blizzard only recently hiring someone to help plan out future seasons, the next few months for Diablo 4 is bleaker than ever and putting it on Steam won’t help at all.
Don’t forget, Overwatch 2’s user reviews on Steam tanked almost immediately as soon as it became available. As of the time of writing, Overwatch 2 has a 2/5 rating on Steam with a little over 173,500 negative reviews. On the other hand, Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 only has over 3,000 reviews but 2,760 of them are negative. Both are rated as “Overwhelmingly Negative” by audiences, which hint at what’s coming to Diablo 4 on October 17. The worst part is that, as Diablo 4 joins this unfortunate triumvirate, it will have the lowest player count of the three.
It’s safe to say that Blizzard’s attempt at the live-service genre with Diablo 4 has gone as well as Lilith’s plan to conquer both Hell and Heaven (spoiler: Lilith fails and dies at the end).
The only positive here is that integration with Steam means that Diablo 4 will run better, or at least, be more convenient to play on the Steam Deck. The dungeon crawler plays surprisingly well on Valve’s mini PC, provided that you’re willing to jump through a couple of hoops to make it work. But, now that it will be on Steam, all you’ll ever need now is a Wi-Fi connection and you’ll be able to complete your nth Nightmare Dungeon, because that’s pretty much only what Diablo 4 is good for nowadays.
We’ll find out soon enough how Diablo 4’s debut on Steam will go.
For now though, Diablo fans can check out the game’s ongoing and upcoming crossovers with Overwatch 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
