When we look back at 2012, we remember at as the year of Kickstarter, the year of the indie game like Fez, the year of the indie mod-cum-standalone official game like DayZ. Really though, 2012 was the year of Diablo. Blizzard’s dungeon crawler returned to the prominence it held over a decade ago. Not just because of Diablo 3 either. The minds behind that series returned to the format big time, developing upcoming titles like Marvel Heroes and major hits like Torchlight 2. Nothing demonstrates the popularity of the loot crawl like Torchlight 2’s success. The game has sold 1 million copies after just three months.
Developer Runic Games announced the milestone on Monday to celebrate the close of a big year.
“We had an amazing 2012, and proud to say that Torchlight 2 has sold over 1 million units!” said the studio on Twitter.
The original Torchlight, released at the tail end of 2009, was also a success but at its current pace the sequel is set to outpace its predecessor by a wide margin. Torchlight didn’t hit 500,000 copies sold until six months after its initial downloadable release. It wasn’t until July 2011, nearly two years after that release and following a retail PC release, a Mac version, and an Xbox Live Arcade edition, that the game hit the 1 million sold milestone. Torchlight 2 has sold 1 million copies as a PC-only game, though, and Runic has no plans to port the game to consoles this time around.
There was some worry that Torchlight 2 wouldn’t connect with gamers, predominantly because it was releasing so close to Diablo 3. Runic originally announced Torchlight 2 as a spring 2011 game before delaying it until July 2011 and then later into 2012, closer to when Blizzard would unleash its years-in-development sequel. Runic founders Max and Eric Schaefer, two of the minds behind original Diablo studio Blizzard North, actually found that the huge popularity of Diablo 3 helped their game. “We’re doing pre-sales on Steam, and the day Diablo 3 released they shot up by 40 percent,” said Max Schaefer in an interview this past summer, “They’re bringing in lots of people into this genre, and people are becoming aware of what we’re doing through them. We’re kind of piggybacking on their marketing.”
What’s next for Runic? There are “no plans” for a console version of Torchlight 2 and the plan to make a Torchlight MMO has been junked. “We really need to take a break,” said Runic’s Marsh Lefler, “Something slightly different will be nice. We still love RPGs, especially action ones.”
