Offline gaming is far from being dead

We all know that Diablo 3 will be "online only". Blizzard did it the right way: by saving everything on Battle.net we will avoid the insane mass of cheaters that usually plague online communities. Of course no company will ever be able to 100% defeat bad players (see Battlefield3 and World of Warcraft, for example). That said, "few cheaters" is still better than "insane amount of cheaters".

When Blizzard announced this "online only" feature, most of us went nuts. Because let's say it: Diablo has always been a true offline title, where you can grin for hours wherever you are: home, work, airplane, train, mountains, a deep cave in the mountains. We never "needed" internet to play Diablo, why is it mandatory now? Well, both cheaters and Real Money Auction House are a good answer.

But... are players really interested in the old "offline" mode? Diablo 3 will come out in 2012, is it really possible that someone still focuses on single-player and/or offline games? The short answer is yes, absolutely. Skyrim (launched November 11th) game gave us an amazing example with detailed numbers. Considering the PC version and peeking at the numbers provided by Steam (that takes into account both digital and retail versions), here we have a comparison between this game (Skyrim, released on 11/11/2011) and a "best seller" like Call of Duty MW3, released on 08/11/2011:

Skyrim day one

Skyrim day two

As you can see, these numbers are massive... and impressive. With a mere difference of 2 days between the release dates, Skyrim is now grinding almost 4X the users, compared to CoD MW3. It basically means that people still love single player and offline titles. Skyrim is also highly moddable, another "plus" that surely grabs the attention of many of us, because it allows the game to last for years.

Would Diablo 3 benefit from any kind of "offline gaming" and/or "moddable opportunities"? Yes, definitely. I guess it would grab at least twice the audience, because those numbers clearly show us how much gamers still care about being able to customize a game and play it without the hassle of being constantly plugged to the net.

P.S. - Blizzard is too quiet these days... Too much.

Data source: here.