At the time of writing on September 22, SteamDB is showing roughly 26,700 people playing Diablo IV concurrently. That is down from some of the enormous peaks recorded during the free period, as expected, but it remains dramatically above where the game sat before Season 15. When we checked Diablo IV at the beginning of September, Steam was hovering around just 2,400 to 2,500 concurrent players.
Three weeks later, and after the free access has ended, that number is still more than ten times higher.
The Free Weekend Is Actually Over Now
This distinction matters. When we looked at Diablo IV's Steam surge on September 19, more than 30,000 people were playing concurrently and the latest 24-hour peak had reached 48,865. Those numbers looked impressive, but the game was also completely free to play at the time. It would have been rather ambitious to declare that Season 15 had permanently resurrected Diablo IV while thousands of those players had not yet been required to buy anything.
Steam's free license expired on September 21 at 10 a.m. PT, or 17:00 UTC. Players who were simply using the free weekend can no longer continue playing without owning the game. That makes today's live count substantially more useful than the numbers we saw over the weekend.
There is one important caveat. SteamDB currently lists a 24-hour peak of 49,572 players, but that 24-hour window still overlaps with the final hours of the free period. We therefore cannot point at 49,572 and claim almost 50,000 paying players suddenly decided to stay. The live count after the free license expired is the more interesting number right now.
26,000 Players Is Still a Huge Change From Early September
The comparison with Season 14 is difficult to ignore. On September 2, Diablo IV was sitting around 2,500 concurrent Steam players. It was the familiar end-of-season desert: dedicated players were waiting for something new, BlizzCon had not happened yet and Season 15 was still ahead.
Since then, quite a lot has happened.
Diablo IV became free to play temporarily, Blizzard launched Season of Hell's Legacy, BlizzCon dumped a considerable amount of Diablo news onto the community and players started uncovering an increasingly absurd collection of anniversary secrets. Hidden Runewords, Uber Tristram, the Hellfire Torch, Whimsyshire, cow armor and a demonic fishing boss have given Season 15 the sort of discovery phase Diablo tends to enjoy enormously.
Then there is the price.
Diablo IV is still 75% off on Steam at $12.49 until September 24. That means anyone who spent the free weekend enjoying the game has been presented with a fairly uncomplicated proposition: keep playing for approximately the price of a takeaway pizza, or return to whatever responsible activity they were doing before somebody showed them the Horadric Cube.
We Still Don't Know How Many Free Players Bought Diablo 4
This is where the numbers stop being able to answer everything we would like them to. SteamDB can show how many Steam users are currently running Diablo IV. It cannot tell us which of those players already owned the game, which bought it during the sale, which returned specifically for Season 15 or which installed it after seeing Blizzard's BlizzCon announcements.
It also remains important to remember that Steam is not Diablo IV's entire population. Battle.net, Xbox and PlayStation players are absent from these figures. Steam is useful because it gives us a public trend line, not because it provides a census of Sanctuary.
What that trend line currently tells us is nevertheless interesting. The end of free access caused a drop, but not a return to the 2,500-player territory we were looking at three weeks ago.
The Next Test Comes After September 24
There is actually one more artificial support holding the Steam number up: the sale itself. Diablo IV remains $12.49 until September 24, while Lord of Hatred is also discounted by 25%. Anyone who enjoyed the free weekend still has a short period to convert into a paying player at a heavily reduced price.
That makes September 25 and the following weekend the next useful checkpoint.
If Diablo IV remains somewhere significantly above its pre-Season 15 Steam population after the discount disappears, we will have stronger evidence that Blizzard managed to bring a meaningful number of players back rather than simply borrowing them for a weekend. If the number falls rapidly toward the old baseline, then the free access and enormous discount did most of the heavy lifting.
For now, though, the first post-free-weekend result is better than a complete collapse.
Diablo IV had roughly 2,500 Steam players when we checked at the beginning of September. Today it has around 26,700.
The doors are no longer free.
Sanctuary is still busy.
