I think the Starcraft franchise is more popular than Diablo. I have no proof, it’s just a feeling I’ve had for the last 10 years.

I disagree, I think it has done extremely well in Korea but outside of Korea players have moved on.

Well first of all, SC is a couple years older than D2, so even if players have moved on a couple years from now D2’s going to be less popular than it currently is too.  Secondly, just because a playerbase is in Korea does not mean that the playerbase randomly doesn’t count.  Thirdly, just going by wikipedia numbers, SC has outsold D2 2:1… the source for the SC numbers is 2006, the source for the D2 numbers is 2008, so the “couple years older” argument doesn’t really serve as a benefit to D2 here.

Totally agree with Mouse - SC is far bigger than Diablo.

It’s great for itself that both games are still played from so much people so frequently, but that doesn’t change the “facts” (if we trust wikipedia, but I do *g).

Starcraft and Diablo 2 are both legends in their own rights.
When it comes to SC2 and D3 though, I have a feeling that D3 has more of a chance to become successful than SC2. Somehow Starcraft’s success seems more like a matter of luck than godly design. I’m not sure they’re going to be able to replicate that with Starcraft 2.
With Diablo 2 on the other hand, they’ve got more of a clue as to what exactly made it successful. With some fine-tuning, they could make D3 even better.

To clarify, I’m fairly sure that D3 will be at least if not more successful than SC2, and I do agree with redrach almost entirely… I’m not sure it’s fair to cite “luck” as part of SC’s success, but other than that I don’t disagree with what he’s saying.
-look at WC3 vs SC/BW in terms of popularity and sales
-consider the inertia/nostalgia factors that SC/BW has going for it; SC2, or any new RTS, needs to compete with more than just “being a better game”.

I completely agree with redrach that that it’s not going to be an easy task for Blizzard to replicate that success.

On the other hand
-look at WoW vs D2 vs D1 in terms of popularity and sales and Blizzard clearly has a trend towards increasing their player base with every RPG they come out with
-D2’s success depends a LOT less on ability to create balance and as such, like redrach stated, is easier to replicate

My other comment was in response to Rush’s comment about which franchise *is* more popular, not the news post about which one *will be* more popular… I suspect the reason D3 isn’t #1 there is that D3 is likely not going to be an 09 release, though I haven’t read the article to know for sure.

I don’t think there was more luck involved in SCs success than any other great game. Like all other Blizzard games, when SC came out it was way above the competition in it’s genre. I remember being blown away by how detailed and polished it was. At the time most RTS had only 2 playable races and if they had more, the difference between them was mostly superficial. Not so with SC. Today when I meet people who still play SC they say the reason is that it’s the best balanced RTS ever.

I’m pretty sure blizz wont release SC2 unless it raises the quality bar and packs some new ideas, like it’s predecessor did. I think SC2 will sell at least as much as D3. In the end I think the deciding factor will be which genre is more popular because both games will be on top of their own. It shall be exciting to find out which will sell more!

I looked at the top 10 games, apart from StarCraft 2, the rest didn’t really made any impression on me.

To hell with that shitty website.

Hehe, this is a pet argument of me and Rush =)

To be fair, the highest amount of current SC1 players are in Korea, and highest current D2 players are in the West. Sales figures for the games will get a bit skewed, since the licensing works different in Korea, and I assume that on pure numbers, it will be lower (since they sell a license for a PC Baang, not games per user), so if 2006 figures pointed at SC1 being bigger, it’s likely comparable at least in the west to D2.

Most pro gamers use CCUP etc to play, so the numbers on Battle.net are mostly Western players.

Having said that, the community for D2 is a lot larger, mainly because of the item trading aspects of the game, which tend to retain players for longer. SC is more like a FPS in that regard, you play, win/lose, and either play again or not.

I agree with everyone that D3 would have been on the list if it was anticipated for 2009.

As for SC1 success, sure, they were lucky with the release in Korea for the long-term progaming they have *today*, but sales in general is wholly made from a brilliantly polished concept and excellent execution.

Now, if it turns out they have fooled us all, and they are in fact working on a SC MMO, then all hell will break loose

Oops, knew I was forgetting one thing that I’d meant to put on my list of reasons D3 will be at least as successful and probably more so than SC2 in terms of units sold… multiboxing.  If the number of players on each game randomly ends up being identical it is virtually gaurenteed there will copies of D3 sold just so that people can get multiple keys/accounts/whatever they need to run extra characters.

And Leord, if SC/BW sales are skewed up (10 million vs 5 million still seems like a *VERY* large discrepency) due to different licensing systems in Korea, then you also need to consider that (in terms of popularity, not success):
-BW sales are skewed down worldwide because it is a burnable game (don’t know about you, but when it came out here I think exactly 2 people at my school actually paid money for it)
-D2/X sales are skewed up for the multiboxing reason listed above… I know that a lot of the keys people use these days are old, stolen, or the results of cross realm sharing, but there should still be a rather large number of people who have actually purchased multiple keys.