Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred DLC boosts Steam players to record high, despite rocky launch

Diablo 4's expansion Vessel of Hatred released earlier today, welcoming a record number of Steam players in the process.

At the time of writing, there are 45,231 Diablo 4 players on Steam, a record for Blizzard's hellish game on the platform. Earlier today, the all-time Steam player peak was sitting at 39,782, recorded four months ago.

Diablo 4 originally launched on consoles and for PC via Battle.net in June 2023, then popped up on Steam that October, by which point it had reached 12 million players total.

Despite these record-breaking numbers on Steam, Vessel of Hatred hasn't had the smoothest of debuts. Its launch had to be delayed by several hours due to "a small technical issue".

This has, unfortunately for Blizzard, seen a spate of negative reviews for the expansion. As I write, there are a total of 269 reviews for Vessel of Hatred on Steam. Of those, 69 are positive (nice), but the remaining 200 are negative.

Image credit: SteamDB/Eurogamer

Meanwhile, there are still reports on social media of some lingering niggles, and Blizzard's Adam Fletcher recently acknowledged an issue in which players are randomly losing their access to Vessel of Hatred through their play sessions on consoles.

"We have identified the issue and have a fix in flight for testing. The plan is for this to be in our next hotfix," Fletcher wrotein a blog post titled Vessel of Hatred Licence Revokes. "The workaround for now is to log out and back in or by swapping to a non Spiritborn character and then back again.

"Apologies for this but we are hoping to have a fix out for this soon!"

Hopefully, Blizzard will sort out those remaining kinks soon, and in time for our own Vessel of Hatred review. As a reminder, there was a setback with our code, so Eurogamer's Vessel of Hatred review will be arriving on the site a little later than anticipated.

Elsewhere, Blizzard recently announced Diablo 4 will be getting that shiny PS5 Pro Enhanced label on the release of Sony's console. This all means Diablo 4 players with a PS5 Pro will be able to take full advantage of the console's improved features, such as advanced ray tracing and a GPU that enables up to 45 percent faster rendering, thanks to a free software update.