Diablo IV is a big video game jam-packed with hundreds of hours’ worth of gameplay. Making a game this big isn’t easy, and takes a lot of people. In fact, according to the credits, over 8,500 people worked on Blizzard’s massive sequel.
Released last month, Diablo IV is the latest entry in Blizzard’s popular and long-running demon-killin’ franchise. The game offers more or less the same classic looting and dungeon-crawling action the series is famous for but with more side-quests, bosses, and locations. Making a game this big takes a long time, a lot of work, and many hands. And according to MobyGames, Diablo IV’s credits contain a staggering amount of people. Specifically, 9,166 souls are listed in the game’s very long credits.
On July 10, MobyGames tweeted that Diablo IV had set a new record for the largest number of people listed in a game’s credits. The site also dug into them and pulled out some interesting bits of data. For example, audio-related roles, according to the game’s credits, make up the majority of the listed credits, at 2,464 people. Other common roles included 902 people in art- and graphics-related roles, 397 people connected to quality assurance, and 394 programmers and engineers. There were also 67 development babies!
While Diablo IV’s credits are long, not every person listed worked directly on the game. 475 people in the credits were listed under “thanks.” That’s a lot of thank yous.
9,166 people is one of those numbers that sounds big but is a bit hard to fully grasp. So I did a bit of digging and figured out using U.S. Census Data that if Diablo IV’s credits were an incorporated town, it would be the 3,337th largest city in the country behind Manteno Village, Illinois. That would make it larger than about 83 percent of all towns and cities in the United States.
As for how this number compares to other big video games from over the years, it just reinforces how many more people worked on this game compared to most other titles. For example, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey had fewer than 6,000 people in its credits. And GTA V had fewer than 4,000. And Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had fewer than 900. So yeah, Diablo IV’s credit roll is huge. I also imagine that, as games get bigger and more complex, we might see even larger credits in the future.
