Diablo 4 (opens in new tab) wrapped up its second and final beta period last weekend, and the numbers are in: the two beta weekends from March 17 to March 20 and March 24 to March 27 were the largest betas in Diablo history, with over 2.6 million players reached level 20 and earned the wolf pup backpack (opens in new tab).

Players spent a total of 61.5 million hours in Diablo 4 during the beta. That's the equivalent of over 7,000 calendar years. If you bottled up all that time and used it however you wanted, you could go back in time to the era of pyramid building and still have 2,000 or so years to spare. Diablo is too powerful and must be stopped.

But there are plenty of other huge numbers to distract us from the terrifying grip Diablo 4 has on our lives. For example, players slaughtered about 29.3 billion monsters in just over six days of operation, and only about 47 million people died in the process. Two of those monsters were mine. [1.7 million players fell before Butcher's Cleave (one of them was PCG's Andy Chalk, who rather enjoyed it (open in new tab)), and only 577,000 were able to defeat him.

The numbers for the beta world boss, Ashaba, were even more dismal for players. This mean-spirited dragon laid waste to more than 10 million players in a short time of play, but only died about 107,000 times. To be fair, it was designed so that it would take 12 players to defeat her, unless you were the kind of person who almost soloed her (open in new tab) before the necromancer got the kill.

Blizzard actually acknowledges that valiant solo attempt in its statistics: in the corner it says in small letters, "Solo Ashava kills:

Apart from that, Blizzard also revealed that the most popular classes are the Sorcerer and the Necromancer. This is not surprising since both classes are considered by players to be quite overpowered (both have tremendous aesthetic power). I'm not sure if I feel justified in the popularity of these two that I chose to play, or if I'm put off by the fact that I apparently chose the normal class.

These stats are impressive, but will be instantly dwarfed when Diablo 4 launches on June 6 (open in new tab). Who's going to hang on for another 7,000 years?