• A new competition from Blizzard to promote its Season of Blood update for Diablo IV will see players donate actual blood to stand a chance to win a top-of-the-range custom PC.
• Blizzard says the liquid-cooled PC will have actual human blood flowing in it.
• In-game cosmetics and items will also be released as donors reach the blood goal of 666 quarts (630 litres).

In a bid to counter the shortage of transfusable blood in the US, Blizzard is raffling off a custom PC which it says will have real human blood circulating in the coolant system.

The blood PC will also be used to generate more interest around the latest update to Diablo IV, Season of Blood, which introduces a new questline and the ability to become a vampire. New enemies, new bosses, new items and new abilities will be available to players of Diablo IV, Blizzard’s best game in years, after the update and the “Blood Harvest” competition suits the theme.

From 20th October to 20th November, players in the US can stand a chance to win the custom Diablo IV rig and other goodies if they upload proof of a blood donation to the Blizzard website from any blood donation centre,

Blizzard says that every player who donates will become eligible for rewards as the community works towards donating a combined total of 666 quarts of blood, or around 630 litres.

The company will release unique, blood-coated in-game cosmetics of increasing grandeur at 33 percent, 66 percent and 100 percent of the goal. Once the grand total is reached, it will raffle off the custom liquid-cooled PC to players who have donated blood.

In-game include new weapons at 33 percent:

• Bloodpetal Anlace dagger,
• Bloodpetal Sever axe,
• Bloodpetal Heart necromancer focus,
• Bloodpetal Blade,
• and Bloodpetal Bludgeon staff.

At 66 percent and 100 percent all players will receive the Loch Raeth Maor Barbarian armour cosmetics and the Vermillion Eye Piebald mount, respectively. Of course, once the 100 tier is reached in terms of total blood donations, the custom PC sweepstakes will begin.

Since an average human being has around five litres of blood, Diablo IV players will stand a chance to win the rig if a total of 126 gamers are sacrificed to Lillith, exsanguinated to feed her blood fountain.

While the blood in the machine-gimmick provides for an interesting, if unsanitary, story, we’re more interested in the hardware of the rig, which is well worth the lives of 126 gamers.

The PC contains an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, an Intel Core i9 CPU, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, 3TB SSD storage, and a Quantum Vector GPU water block for cooling. As such, the lucky donor who wins the rig will have an incredibly powerful machine kitted out with top-of-the-range components to the value, by our calculations, of R76 000. Seems well worth a few hours of time, especially for a good cause.

This competition is only available to people over 18 in the United States, unfortunately, so no South African gamers will be able to win the unholy machine on offer. Total donations can be tracked by an actual blood fountain, found here.

At the time of writing, players have donated up to 25 percent of the blood goal, or around 151 litres of blood. Fresh meat!

[Image – Blizzard Entertainment]