Diablo III release date - Christmas Eve?

[jackslammer]

Blizzard Entertainment's upcoming dungeon destroyer Diablo III is said to be coming on December 24 according to a rumour on the website kaputik.com where Associates working on a Diablo 3 game design have supplied the following information.

The online beta multiplayer trial version is currently set for an 11th September release.

The final version is to be released before Christmas - 24th December 2009.

http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=3112?gr_i_ni

[Faldelore]

Santa's fucked...

[Firecrest]

That'd be pretty wierd. Don't most retailers want to get a piece of the gift giving action? It seems like releasing it on Christmas Eve would miss out on a lot of potential revenue.

[Hitshade]

I remember something stating that Blizzard plans to release one flagship game per year (or something to that effect). This years release likely being the first episode of SCII.

It would be holiday sales suicide to release a game on Christmas eve. Blizzard just doesn't strike me as being that stupid. In light of their strict "its done when its done" policy I also doubt they would even hint at a projected release date this early.

Not that leaks of this type haven't mysteriously happened before... I seem to recall Gamestop/EB posting wotlk's release date accurately, prior to the official Blizzard announcement.







Here it is:



Activision loses money, Blizzard to release one marquee game per year

by Mike Schramm { 26 days ago }
Feb 12th, 2009
Activision-Blizzard held a conference call for the press yesterday, and so there's all kinds of financial and release news floating around out there. The biggest news isn't necessarily Blizzard-related, but it does mean that our game's company is finally feeling the crunch a bit: Activision-Blizzard reported a loss of $72 million in the last quarter, and their outlook for the coming year fell short of analysts' expectations. Even though that sounds bad, it doesn't mean things are necessarily bad, though: Blizzard themselves added nearly a billion dollars to the total, so while A-B might not be doing so well, B is doing just fine.

Blizzard CEO Paul Sams also announced during the call that the company is now aiming for "one 'frontline' title per year," though not necessarily World of Warcraft related. That likely means that we'll see the first Starcraft 2 this year -- our friends at Joystiq have a quick report on the beta appearing soon, as well as the Battle.net revamp we've been waiting for. And it also means that (unless Blizzard is really rolling on Diablo III, which I doubt, given its condition when we played it at last year's BlizzCon), that we'll be looking at mid/late 2010 for the release of the next WoW expansion.

Besides the loss of the $72 million (it's always in the last place you look), things seem to be hopping at Blizzard and their parent company. Should be a pretty busy 2009 for them.

[Burlock]

lol september 11th?