We visited Blizzard's floor space at Gamescom 2018, and what a space it was. Easily one of the more expansive areas, Blizzard outdid themselves with their multiple staging areas for the multitude of their developed - or in permanent development - games. Naturally, the crown jewel of Blizzard's space was World of Warcraft, but Overwatch stood just beside it, as if a wayward child trying to look over its ancestors' shoulder.

The games market went to Hell in May. Diablo III topping retail software sales for the month, according to the latest sales figures from NPD, and helped fuel a resurgence in the PC games space. Other top performers included Max Payne 3, which launched the same day as Diablo III, as well as Sniper Elite V2 and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
While action titles continued their dominance of the top 10, 2K Sports' NBA 2K12 held the fifth spot for the second straight week. Blizzard continued to show its impact in the PC market with Diablo III at number 1, the first time since July 2010 that a PC-only title has accomplished that feat. The game that did it in 2010? StarCraft 2, another Blizzard mainstay.

Total video game sales continued to shrink, down 28 percent from last year. However, the PC market jumped 230 percent from the same time last year to $80 million, fueled by Diablo III sales. The overall spend in May, including digital sales and microtransactions was estimated to be $1.17 billion.

From the launch day server meltdown to the way everyone you know seems to be playing, it's pretty clear that Diablo III is quite popular. But just how popular? Blizzard announced today that it sold 3.5 million copies within the first 24 hours, which supposedly makes it the fastest-selling PC game of all time. On top of those 3.5 million copies were another 1.2 million doled out free to World of Warcraft Annual Pass subscribers. After a week, Blizzard says, Diablo III was up to 6.3 million players--not including South Korean game rooms, where it's estimated to have a 39% share. "We're definitely thrilled that so many people around the world were excited to pick up their copy of Diablo III and jump in the moment it went live," CEO Mike Morhaime said in the announcement.

"We also regret that our preparations were not enough to ensure everyone had a seamless experience when they did so. I want to reaffirm our commitment to make sure the millions of Diablo III players out there have a great experience with the game moving forward, and I also want to thank them for their ongoing support." As well as rolling out sneaky little balance updates, Blizzard is investigating reports of nasty hacks, and preparing to launch the real-money auction house on May 29.

Shacknews is reporting Diablo III is pretty popular. So popular, in fact, that the servers have been overloaded by the flood of clickmaniacs trying to play when it launched at midnight. As Diablo III requires players be online to play, even by themselves, there are a lot of sullen faces around this morning, staring glumly at 'Error 37' messages. Still, some are able to play. There's a little good D3 news in that Blizzard is helping out Australian fans who pre-ordered from GAME, after the failing retailer said it wouldn't honour their orders but would keep their money.

"Due to high concurrency the login servers are currently at full capacity. This may cause delays in the login process, account pages and web services," a Blizzard representative said of Error 37. "We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience while this is being resolved." A message on the login screen notes, "We're also aware of issues affecting character creation and are working to resolve them at this time." Hang in there, then. As for the land down under, after GAME entered administration earlier this week, it told Diablo III pre-orders that they wouldn't receive their game, but nor could they get a refund. Blizzard kindly stepped in to save them, explaining that those with proof of preordering can buy a digital copy through Battle.net then submit their GAME receipt for a refund. You'll need to buy before May 21, and send your receipt in by June 30, though.

Today Shacknews is reporting that Diablo III will be open to the public for beta testing. The open beta weekend begins this afternoon at 12:01pm Pacific, then will run until 10:00am on Monday, Blizzard explains in a Diablo blog post. All you need to play is a Battle.net account. You can download the client in advance, so you don't miss a second. The beta is relatively small, packing the first part of Diablo III's first act, but you will be playing Diablo III. Unlike proper closed beta testers, open beta players won't receive 'Beta Bucks' to spend in the auction house and cannot post in the beta forums.

Diablo III launches for PC and Mac on May 15. The closed beta test will wrap up on May 1.

The latest beta drivers and the first in the 290 series have been released by NVIDIA today, supporting all graphics cards since the venerable 6-series. Their main new feature are official support for enabling ambient occlusion settings in the control panel separately for specific games and enabling NVIDIA Surround on the new X79 SLI-certified motherboards. Ambient occlusion (AO) is settable for uber-popular games The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. So, what does AO do? We'll let Andrew Burns of NVIDIA explain:

If you're unfamiliar with Ambient Occlusion, it is most easily described as a way to make in-game shadowing more realistic, and therefore better.

What he doesn't say of course, is how it kills your frame rate, especially on lower end hardware. Anyway, there's all the usual goodies in this release: 3D Vision game profiles for games such as MW3, Diablo 3 & LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (yes really). There's a HD audio update and nine fixes too, including one for random flickering of the Windows boot logo as it's loading or fading away and a fix for the mouse cursor flickering and shaking in games such as Crysis 2 & Deus Ex when SLI is enabled when using 3DTV Play. The NVIDIA product release page is here and they have a snazzy-looking driver selector here. The release notes follow.

Blizzard has confirmed that the Necromancer, a character class featured in the second versions of Diablo, will be entirely missing in the third installment of the game. Speaking to Kotaku at the Leipzig Games Convention, Jay Wilson Diablo 3's lead designer said:

The Necromancer was simply a victim of his own success, ... He was just too well crafted as a character.

The absence of the Necromancer will be replaced by a new class called Witch Doctor, the Barbarian will also go through some changes and character improvements. That's all for today Diablo fans, more is coming when Blizzard decides its time.