Dug

@JasonBaur

Remove Korea, the e-sports thing and multiple account users the SC, and the sales are good, but hardly great. Consoles games hit 30-40 million in sales in a few years in some cases, so 10 million is 10 years is good, but not earth-shattering. And I said RTS's are niche, so show me any RTS (outside of SC) with sales numbers approaching some of the big FPS's or Wii games. Just because your world revolves around Blizzard does not make universal.

@Berzerk

I'll give you Nintendo, but Valve? Seriously? And for sports games, well that's just specific to those franchises (kinda like Rock Band), where the content is purely modular, just plug in new rosters/songs and good to go

@woooooooot

How are they mainstream? RTS's and dungeon crawlers are far from mainstream. And D2 has been out what, 10 years? And WoW, its popular sure, albeit in the Western world far less than say MW2 or Halo (70% of their subscribers are in Asia now). As goliath as Blizzard is, they pale to say, Rock Band and most of the console giants sales-wise. However, they do get to milk their customers for $15 a month.

@Frivolous

Torchlight 1 has sold 725k copies, and isn't even on consoles yet... so yeah no. Blizz games (excluding WoW) are far more nitch than their fanbase wants to believe (and FAR more expensive than the torchlight games), as seen by the amazing plunge in SC2 sales after the first week in the US and UK. Sure they will pick up some fans from WoW, but being very expensive PC only, non-mmorpg games still still limits their sales.

Personally I think all they have to do is make it "as good" as D2. Their fanbase has made it clear from SC2 that a simple update and polish to the original is more than enough to get huge sales and ridiculously high review scores. And D2 is free of the professional gaming requirements that SC2 was mainly developed for.

Blizz is probably the only gaming house right now that can simply slap on a new coat of paint, buff it up real good and just roll in the money. They built up the most devoted fanbase on the planet, why should they endanger that.

Most impressive thing is the amazing SC2 sales crash, looks like fanbois will only get you so far when you release a mediocre and outdated game with a crap online system. Guess they still have Korea and their e-sports though....