Difference between revisions of "Diablo III release date"

Revision as of 01:50, 2 September 2010

As with all Blizzard titles, the release date is, "When it's done." They do not make estimates in advance or give hints, at least not publicly.

Diablo 3 release dates are often given/guessed at by media sources and especially by software merchants. These dates have no authority and exist solely to spur interest/pre-sales.

• News items related to Diablo 3's release date. More than two dozen by mid-2010, since this is an evergreen rumor.
• Screenshot gallery of (incorrect) estimated release dates.

Not 2010

In Activision Blizzard financial reports, two games are reported as being released this year: Starcraft II and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Diablo III is not even planned in an optimistic viewpoint (it could still have be planned for and delayed) for this year.

Starcraft II First

There were some rumors in 2008[1] that Diablo 3 was further along in the development cycle than Starcraft 2. Blizzard immediately denied that, they always said Starcraft 2 would be released first, and it was, on July 27, 2010. With Diablo 3 still nowhere near beta testing at that point, that's as thorough a rumor debunking as you're ever going to see.

Diablo III

D3 in "Next Few Years" as of late 2009.

No one at Blizzard has ever yet given any hint of a release date, or schedule, or estimate, or anything of the kind for Diablo 3, other than to say it would not be out in 2010[2], and that as of late 2009 it was in their pipeline for the "next few years."[3]

Their only other public comments on the "when" question are terse official statements[4] that Diablo 3 does not have a release date, whenever a new rumor pops up and gains enough traction that they feel it's necessary to restate the obvious.

As of July 2010, fansite Diii.net had tagged more than twenty-five news items with the "release date rumor" keyword, showing just how often this sort of thing pops up.

Estimated Progress?

Estimates of a percentage completed are discouraged by Blizzard development teams, since there's no way to quantify the process in that fashion. They spent years working on the foundation of Diablo III: programming the game engine, trying out numerous different styles of art design, coming up with a plot and character concepts, etc. The hardware and foundational work takes as long or longer than adding in the content, which makes it impossible to estimate the overall percentage completed.

Almost since the game was announced in June 2008 the developers have said that they were well into content production.[5] (Meaning that the engine and basic game functions were all locked down and working properly.) Content though, especially in Blizzard titles, is such a huge area of work that experienced Blizzard-watchers expected the content production and balancing would take years. And with the earliest feasible release date coming in mid-2011, they'll have had at least 3 years of intensive content development by that point.

Diablo III Demo

Blizzard has not said anything specifically about the upcoming demo of Diablo III, but when talking about StarCraft II, they said they had plans for a demo, and that they "use to do that after release". Most likely, we can expect a trial version of Diablo III after release.

Guess the Release Date

If you're the betting type, there's a well-advanced release date prediction pool you can join in here.

Related Information

You can read more about the system requirements, beta testing, price/payment methods and age rating on the Diablo 3 Basics page.

Release Date Gallery

Images related to the Diablo III release date.

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  Fye's very wrong January 2010 estimate.

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  Swedish Gameshop: December 31, 2010.

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  NewEgg.com: December 31, 2010.

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  GameStop's in-store estimate: March 1, 2011.

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  Wal-Mart's in-store estimate: March 1, 2011.