Blizzard just had its third-best fiscal year for top-line revenue in company history, and Diablo 4 is a big part of why.
That’s not a rumor from a forum. It comes from an internal email attributed to Blizzard President Johanna Faries, sent to staff ahead of BlizzCon 2026, which runs September 12-13 in Anaheim, California.
The line everyone’s going to fixate on: Blizzard is reportedly known inside Microsoft as its “top-performing studio.”
What the email actually says
Here’s Faries, in full: “In [Fiscal Year ’26] Blizzard ended the year as the top-performing studio in Xbox’s studios division, and this past year has marked our third highest fiscal for top-line revenue in Blizzard’s history…FY25 and FY26 were our first back-to-back years of growth since FY17…Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred and Overwatch drove exceptional performance in particular, with Overwatch delivering its strongest quarter since 2022.”
Read that twice. Back-to-back growth years for the first time since FY17. That’s a long drought for a studio this size.
And the credit doesn’t land where you’d expect. World of Warcraft isn’t the headline this time. It’s Diablo 4 and Overwatch, the latter having dropped the “2” from its name this year.
Faries wants BlizzCon to be a launchpad
She’s not subtle about it either. “It’s my hope that the event can shine a light on the work underway at Blizzard, and that it can serve as a powerful springboard into a new era of momentum and excitement behind our mission to bring joy and belonging for communities worldwide,” Faries said.
Translation for the rest of us: they think they’ve got heat, and they’d like to spend it in Anaheim.
Diablo 4 has already outlasted its predecessors
Two major expansions in. That’s more than Diablo 3 managed with Reaper of Souls and the smaller Necromancer pack. More than Diablo 1 got with Hellfire. More than Diablo 2 got with Lord of Destruction.
The franchise math is simple. Diablo 4 is being supported harder and longer than any Diablo before it, and the revenue numbers are the reason why.
It’s also not the game it was at launch. The changes have piled up to the point where calling it the same product is a stretch.
Constant patching is the house style
This isn’t new behavior. Diablo 2 and 3 both accumulated quality-of-life features and updates over the years. Diablo 2 got a full remake in Resurrected, plus a mountain of mods and patches across its run.
The Diablo teams know how to keep sprucing up a foundation. They’ve been doing it for decades.
The one real blemish is Diablo 3’s launch, which had connection stability problems and the real-money auction house controversy hanging over it. Outside of that, the series reputation is sterling.
The community’s been eating well
Between Diablo 2: Resurrected, Diablo Immortal, Diablo 4 and the legacy games still running, there’s more active Diablo right now than at almost any point in the franchise’s life. It just doesn’t feel that way, because none of it arrived as one big moment.
Blizzard’s own trajectory has been jagged from the start. Small studio to industry fixture in record time, then a monolith under Microsoft and Xbox. Diablo is a huge reason that happened, going back to the original game that took the dungeon-crawling genre by storm.
So when does Diablo 5 show up
Not soon. The current run has to finish first, and that means don’t expect an announcement for a number of years.
The realistic window opens once at least one more expansion is in the running for Diablo 4. That’s when the sequel conversation stops being speculation and starts being a schedule.
But between the numbers, the internal praise from Microsoft and leadership openly framing BlizzCon as a springboard, Diablo 5 looks highly likely.
You don’t post your third-best revenue year in company history off the back of a dungeon crawler and then quietly retire the dungeon crawler.
Faries called it “a new era of momentum.” Somewhere in that sentence, there’s a fifth Diablo waiting.
