Diablo 1 only needed to sell 20,000 copies to break even

Diablo is one of the best-known franchises on planet Earth, but it wasn't always that way. Back in the day, Blizzard North wasn't sure if the game would break even...let alone make a profit.

The original Diablo from 1996 was made on a shoestring budget that only required thousands of sales, not millions, in order to recoup its development costs. According to original Diablo developer David Brevik, the old-school action RPG only needed to sell 20,000 copies to break even.

"If we could just sell 20,000 copies of this game we may be able to make a sequel. That'd be really cool. It'd be a dream if we could make that happen. It went on and it sold really well and everything was great," Brevik reminisced in a stream from 2020.

Fast-forwarding to today and we see Diablo has become a hulking sales behemoth. The series has sold tens of millions of copies and Diablo III had sold 30 million units as of 2015, just 3 years after its original launch. The newly-released Diablo II Resurrected has also moved tremendous volume and is a big shining star in Vicarious Vision's glittering sky of games.

Who knows how much Diablo IV will sell...when it comes out, that is.