#How Blizzard’s Star-Studded Marketing Storm Drove ‘Diablo IV’ to a Sales Record

While Barbie turned the world pink in the lead up to its premiere, another major entertainment brand was leaning into the dark side of culture for its marketing campaign — and it worked.

In its first month, more than 10 million people spent more than 700 million hours playing Diablo IV — the latest installment in the franchise of hellish action role-playing games — and it set a record for Blizzard, selling more units than any other title at that stage of release. Blizzard also had a record quarter with more than $1 billion in net bookings, according to its July 19 earnings report, which the company says was driven by the successful Diablo IV launch.

“Diablo IV is the strongest story we’ve ever done in the franchise,” says Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson. “We know for new players story is very important. We’re really proud of it. Don’t be scared of the four. To be quippy, if you’ve played Diablo before we want this to be your favorite and if you haven’t we want it to be your first.”

They attribute much of the success to the title’s marketing campaign, which was provocative, creative and sometimes a little gross. In addition to a trailer directed by none other than Oscar winner Chloé Zhao, there was also a series of eulogies read by Megan Fox, a Diablo Dungeon Crawl episode with Chloe Grace Moretz, a remix of Halsey’s “Lilith” with Suga from BTS complete with a music video shot in a deconsecrated cathedral featuring a baroque-style fresco inspired by the game, a partnership with KFC, a tattoo parlor takeover, a pop-up “goremet” chocolate shop in London — and a limited edition Demon Meat Shake, which a PC Gamer writer described as “thick gummies immersed in sugary, viscous fluid.”

Blizzard’s VP of Global Marketing for Diablo Kaleb Ruel says they leaned into the “dark culture renaissance,” and looked for things Diablo was uniquely positioned to pull off but that also wouldn’t alienate people who were new to the game.

There was also an unintended viral moment, courtesy of mother nature (and climate change). At the time the game was released on June 6, a devastating series of Canadian wildfires was sending smoke to large swaths of the U.S. and creating nearly unbreathable air. A photo that captured an orange hazy sky above a Diablo IV billboard reading “Welcome to Hell, New York” quickly made the rounds on social media and in the news.

Earlier this summer, The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Fergusson and Ruel about adapting to changes in players’ behavior, leaning into dark culture and learning to trust their instincts when it comes to pushing boundaries.

As Hollywood has been evolving with the shift to streaming, along the same timeline, what has the gaming side of that looked like?

Fergusson: We continue to be in a transitional period of retail to digital and people are actually building a digital library. A lot of consoles are being sold now without an optical disk reader because they’re expected to be digital. A mainstay back in the day, I’ve been making games for 24 years, [was] the midnight lineup outside the store to get the first copy because they were going to be supply-constrained. Now everything’s digital and you can pre-download it before the day even arrives. There’s no reason to line up outside and there are no supply issues.

The idea of a digital library has actually been great because it’s allowed for this cross-generational aspect. We’re on what we call Gen 9 right now with Xbox Series X and Series S and the PlayStation 5. Earlier when a new generation shipped it erased everything you had as a catalog. You went to Gen 5 and you’re like none of my Gen 4 games are going to work, so I have to start over.

[Now] we see back compatibility and support for the previous generation. Diablo IV supports Gen 8, which is the PS4 or the Xbox One, as well as Gen 9. You don’t have that same sort of notion of I have to start my library over again, or I have to go and get another physical thing that goes with this piece of plastic that I play it on. That’s really changed things and changed the dynamic between the generations. That’s something we always talk about because of the generational capability and performance. Obviously, a Gen 9 console is much more performant than a Gen 8. What compromises do you make? How do you make the game work knowing that it can’t perform as well on a Gen 8 that it can as a Gen 9, but there’s a lot of people still playing on Gen 8? There are a lot of questions around that, but I think that notion of a digital library that travels with you across generations has become standard now. That idea of actually having something that lives beyond a single generation just feels empowering as a player.

Ruel: There was this kind of funny reflection moment the team had close to launch where some folks were harking back to the days where a game shipped and everyone went on vacation because there was not really anything to do at that moment in time. In Diablo IV‘s case, it’s a living, breathing game that we’re updating and have a long opportunity in terms of seasons. From a marketing standpoint, we put a lot of emphasis into not only how we’ll market during launch, but looking forward how we’ll support it in seasons.

Fergusson: To what Kaleb is saying, the way that people play now has really changed. It was always about how many credits did you see, how many games did you finish. Now people have started to settle in where games are a hobby or a lifestyle. You become a player of a particular game. I’m a Madden player, or I’m a Diablo player, or I’m a Destiny player. You have this game that you can keep going back to as a live service. What’s motivating with Diablo IV is that we know that people are coming from Diablo III. It’s been out for 11 years, it’s on season 28, and we still have millions of players that come back to that game every season.

This desire to keep playing this one game over a longer period of time is very different. Players have become so much more consumptive. Players want more, more, more, more, more. Like, “Okay, you gave me your thing and I finished it in a weekend. What else you got?” So you’re trying to keep up with their desires. We launched officially on June 6. We did early access on June 1, but there were 700 million hours played of Diablo IV in a little over 24 days. That sort of consumptive nature has really changed the industry.

We’re in a very limited attention economy. How do you market a new game to existing fans and what do you do to try to draw in new ones?

Ruel: One of the first things we did was commission research around what are the things in culture right now that are ownable and attainable for the Diablo brand to really harness through our marketing. For instance, one of the things that we really mined culturally was this sort of dark culture renaissance happening, especially with youth. It meant being able to intersect things like food and fashion and music in ways where that dark culture has a really clear entry point for Diablo. When you think about our launch period, which was a pretty noisy time in culture, the ways that we found most successful for Diablo to break through were the ones where both the existing audience and fans and new players alike could understand and react in a way that feels positive.

What were some of the least traditional activations that you did?

Ruel: The ones that really come to mind are the ones where it’s marketing but it has a higher purpose in terms of its entertainment value or what it’s providing to the player or fan. The big music partnership that we did with Halsey and Suga [of BTS]. It promoted the game and some of those intersection points mentioned, but it’s also bringing two artists together that are beloved and providing a certain level of entertainment to existing Halsey and Suga fans in a way that made everyone win and everyone happy.

The other one that comes to mind is for our beta we wanted to think through a way to elevate Diablo art in a really meaningful way. We partnered with a small city in France to paint a huge fresco of Diablo art on the ceiling of [a deconsecrated cathedral]. It is, of course, a marketing strategy for the game, but it provided tangible meaningful value for people who could actually visit it and walk through it while it was open to the public. Those were the types of strategies where, yes, it was part of the marketing to get awareness and get people in the game, but also provided very clear meaningful value to people in a way that was kind of unexpected.

Fergusson: It was actually serendipity in how the two things that Kaleb just mentioned actually came together. We did the ceiling of the deconsecrated cathedral, and that became the set for the music video for Halsey and Suga. We were able to bring these two executions together, which was really exciting. It was one of those challenges that I was really excited to work with Kaleb on. Because Kaleb ,coming from music and not having as much experience with the gaming industry, wasn’t relying on the old playbook. There was a new energy. We wanted to push the envelope to be edgier and a little younger, [but] it had to feel authentic. Halsey had a song called “Lilith” and our antagonist is Lilith. The fact that she’s willing to remake that song and Suga was willing to come in and write a rap that was based around our themes, it all felt authentic. As somebody who’s been with Diablo for all 26 years, I was proud of every one of these things that we did because it felt at home with the Diablo brand.

Diablo marketing team doing the most pic.twitter.com/cSrNAg0t1i

— Satan (@s8n) June 8, 2023

The whole New York thing was obviously not planned and is awful, but was wild.

Ruel: Our out of home or billboard strategy was always aiming to deliver Diablo in a provocative but appropriate way for the medium. We constructed very geo-specific messaging where we were talking to you, the person in New York saying, “Welcome to Hell” in an environment that felt like it was cheeky and playful. We saw the situation as unfortunate lightning in a bottle. There clearly was a certain playfulness to the community’s reaction to that situation. These are things that are impossible to plan for.

Another example of this that I thought was quite interesting during our launch was we had a certain asset that was compared to Barbie. It’s Lilith’s foot coming down and in someone’s Twitter feed the next image was Barbie’s foot coming down in their ad in the exact same type of pose. These are things that you don’t really plan for, but if you’re intersecting culture in the right way, they naturally get picked up. If the marketing strategy has enough tentacles that that tends to happen.

Fergusson: It’s kind of interesting too because going back to the two audiences — the gamers who know about us and the population that doesn’t — we actually had multiple messages. When we’re talking to gamers, “Deliver us from Evil” was our tagline. We recognized that maybe that wasn’t going to land for somebody who had no knowledge of what Diablo was at all. That’s where we came up with “Welcome to Hell.” We talked about “Go to Hell,” and then we were like, nah, it may not be as welcoming if you’re telling everybody in the world to go to hell. “Welcome to Hell” is a little bit more approachable. Had that billboard said “Deliver us from Evil” it wouldn’t have landed in that moment.

The sales record is obviously exciting. What do you think is the biggest driver of that?

Fergusson: I think there are two things. They both begin with anticipation. It’s been 11 years since Diablo III released proper. Arguably Diablo created the genre of the action role playing game, especially with Diablo II. That this beloved franchise has returned, I think the gamers came back to embrace it in a big way because there’s been all this pent up demand.

The other part is the awareness. The success that the live action ad had on television, the music partnership, the viral photograph. I guess the other part of it is we actually designed a game that was meant to be welcoming to new players. We knew that if you were willing to try you could actually play it and you could actually have fun. As part of my press interviews, I started to say the phrase, “Don’t be scared of the four.” This is a game that has been designed for a new Diablo player. When Kaleb’s awareness landed, we felt good knowing that that a first time player could actually fire up the game and have a good time playing it. It wasn’t like, “Oh, you tricked me. You brought me into a game I can’t play.” We want new players. So it would be those three things that came together to make magic.

Ruel: Attention spans are extremely short and this has impacted how marketing plans over the years have changed. Our plan was constructed to catch fire very quickly and make sure that this launch period was a moment where we really grasp consumer demand. We make comparisons to, for instance, how Barbie markets their movie. We see a lot of similarities in terms of the marketing blitz to have those moments where it’s catching fire from an earned standpoint and everyone’s talking about the brand and seeing the same content. We’re seeing success in marketing a video game that’s more similar to an entertainment property, that you would think of in terms of a movie or a TV show.

What were some of the things that you saw the most encouraging response to, and were there any things you felt like fell flat in comparison?

Ruel: The things that we saw really do well were the executions where it was something only Diablo would really be able to pull off. A good example of this is the eulogies we did with Megan Fox. The tone and the delivery of the content made so much sense. When there’s such a good pairing, it’s like a one plus one equals three kind of situation. It allows it to have a bigger life on the internet. We also had success with that when thinking about food, and knowing food is such a gaming culture intersection point. We thought, “What’s the way Diablo would do that?” We thought through the expression of that and it became the Demon Meat Shake, which is based in a ridiculous fictitious lore that the big bad monster, the Butcher, has ground up a bunch of demon meat and served it in a shake for you. The reaction to it was so viscerally surprising, interested and kind of disgusted. It grabbed people’s attention.

Anytime we did something that was safe or expected those had less success. It’s not that they weren’t successful, it’s just that they didn’t take off in the way that some of the more provocative and intersectional advertising did. They’re kind of tried and trusted marketing tactics, but in a plan that is purposely provocative, they’re the weakest links. It was a good learning experience for us to trust our instincts in terms of pushing the boundaries of how Diablo shows up.

Fergusson: We went to Budapest, Hungary and filmed scenes of the citizens of Sanctuary asking for help and the heroes of Sanctuary providing it. It felt so authentic, and having Chloé [Zhao] direct it was like, “Wait. We have an Oscar-winning director to film our little video game commercial?” It was so surreal in that moment and it really elevated what we were trying to do. You kind of have to act like what you want to be. It’s the old dress for the job you want kind of thing. If you want to be bigger than just what you are, you have to elevate yourself.

How did Chloé Zhao get involved?

Ruel: One thing that we partnered with a close agency on, 72andSunny, was thinking through the really bare bones of the marketing strategy in terms of what we want to accomplish. We had this ambition of making Diablo IV a mature entertainment event of the year — and entertainment was a really specific word in that sentence. It wasn’t gaming, right? It was elevating it to be a larger property in culture and have that authority. With that positioning, it became a lot easier to approach big entertainment directors, not just advertising directors, because the type of work was much more in line with their creative passions and freedom as a director.

Chloé, who has a very similar tone in a lot of her work, looked at the early scripts and storyboards and said that’s something that I would love to bring to life, the artistry, taking small performances and trying to really make them dramatic as they stare at the camera asking for salvation. That really spoke to Chloé and her team and they made the work better from the start and something that we’re really happy with.

What are the key takeaways from this campaign?

Ruel: Trusting our instincts on retaining the core of what Diablo is, and respecting the place it came from, and pairing that with where culture might be today or put a little bit of top spin on what we think dark culture might be tomorrow. Those are the areas that allowed us to have the creative freedom to do something really amazing and something that the fans respect. The twist on how we approach culture. It’s okay to stretch ourselves in how to take something like dark culture and put it through music or pop culture or food.

Fergusson: I think the authenticity part too. We tried to work with people who were fans or got what the vision was. Finding out that Halsey played, finding out that Suga played, finding out David Harbour played. One of the nice things about having a franchise that goes back 26 years is everybody has a story. We didn’t want to go so far afield that we left the authenticity behind and we left our core behind and we left our players behind. We wanted to make sure that we were bringing both along. That’s one of the great things as gaming matures as an industry. It’s not the kid in grandma’s basement kind of stuff that people like to use as the joke of what is a gamer. The reality is there are 3.2 billion people playing games out there in the world today. It’s not this sort of niche hobby anymore. That’s why when we talk about this launch as bigger than an opening weekend for this movie, or opening weekend for a bunch of these movies combined, it’s just trying to express the fact that this is a moment in entertainment and people should take notice and hopefully participate.

Interview edited for length and clarity.