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Blizzard cancels November BlizzCon event

Citing logistics, Blizzard will not be holding its annual November BlizzCon event.

Ozzie Mejia

May 26, 2021 10:40 AM

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With the United States starting to get back to normal as more of its populous receives the COVID-19 vaccine, it was starting to look like in-person events would pick back up. If that's the case, BlizzCon will not be one of them. On Wednesday, Blizzard announced that its annual November convention would not go on as scheduled.

Here's the official announcement from BlizzCon Executive Producer Saralyn Smith on the BlizzCon website:

I hope you're all staying safe and well. As guidelines in California around in-person gatherings continue to evolve and the status of the pandemic fluctuates around the globe, the teams across Blizzard have been discussing what this means for one of the events we miss the most: BlizzCon. We know some of you might be wondering about your own plans to potentially cross the country—not to mention oceans—and meet your friends, family, and fellow community members in California, so today, we wanted to give you a heads-up that we've decided we will not be holding BlizzCon this year.

Building an in-person BlizzCon is an epic and complex affair that takes many months of preparation—not just for us, but also for the many talented production partners, esports pros, hosts, entertainers, artists, and other collaborators we team up with locally and globally to put all of the pieces together. The ongoing complexities and uncertainties of the pandemic have impacted our ability to properly move forward on many of these fronts, and ultimately we're now past the point where we'd be able to develop the kind of event we'd want to create for you in November.

But we don't want to let too long go by before we connect with everyone again. So in the meantime, we're planning a global event for the early part of next year, combining an online show along the lines of our recent BlizzConline with smaller in-person gatherings, and we'll share more as our plans come together.

We very much look forward to celebrating with you all again. Until then, we'll see you in Azeroth, Outland, Sanctuary, and all the other worlds we call home.

It is unknown exactly how the proposed event in early 2022 will blend together a physical gathering with the virtual event setting of February's BlizzConline. Whatever the plan is, Blizzard still has quite a bit to show off, including Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2. Blizzard recently started showing off more of the latter, leading to question marks regarding whether that game's 2022 release window will fall before the start of next year's Overwatch League season.

There are a lot of questions regarding what's next for Blizzard and many of them won't be answered without a BlizzCon. For now, just stay tuned to Shacknews. We'll report on the latest news as it comes in.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?