IGN gave Diablo IV a 9. It took Blizzard a year to earn it.

Let's talk about sample size. IGN reviewed Diablo IV based on approximately 60 hours of pre-launch gameplay on review servers with carefully curated conditions. They then extrapolated a 9/10 score for a game designed to be played for thousands of hours across multiple seasons. In statistical terms, this is called 'reviewing the trailer and calling it the film.'

The data tells the story IGN's review didn't. Diablo IV launched in June 2023 to a Metacritic in the high 80s. By Season 1 — the Season of the Malignant — the user score had cratered. Steam concurrent player counts fell by over 80% within the first two months. Blizzard responded with a 'campfire chat' that was essentially a corporate apology video with bar graphs. When your post-launch strategy involves apologizing with PowerPoint slides, your 9/10 has a margin of error problem.

Here's the math: a 9/10 implies Diablo IV sits in the top 10% of all games ever made. Yet by Season 2, Blizzard had to fundamentally rework itemization, difficulty scaling, and endgame progression — meaning the core systems that define an action RPG were broken at launch. You cannot simultaneously be a 9/10 product and require a ground-up systems rebuild within 12 months. That's a logical contradiction, not a 'live-service evolution.' That's a confidence interval of plus or minus the entire game.

By Season 4, officially dubbed 'Loot Reborn' — a name that inadvertently concedes the loot was previously dead on arrival — the game IGN reviewed no longer existed. The itemization was overhauled. The difficulty curve was redrawn. The endgame loop was rebuilt. IGN scored a version of Diablo IV that Blizzard themselves would later demolish and reconstruct from the foundation. That's not reviewing a game. That's reviewing a demo.

IGN's Diablo IV score joins a proud statistical tradition: Metacritic launch scores for live-service games correlate with exactly nothing six months later. Destiny 2's launch scores don't predict the Forsaken era. Fallout 76's don't predict Wastelanders. And Diablo IV's 9/10 doesn't predict Season of the Malignant any more than a coin flip predicts the weather. The real 9/10 should have gone to Blizzard's marketing team for convincing a dozen publications to publish final verdicts on an unfinished product. The math ain't mathing, and it never was.