BlizzCon is the premiere event for Blizzard fanatics. An event that perhaps has grown too big for its britches in recent years. Blizzard has decided that in light of the fact they might have 3 games releasing this year: Diablo III, Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, they will not be hosting a BlizzCon this year. I’ve personally never been to them nor watched much of their footage online, so I feel like a bit of an outsider looking in on this situation.
I really don’t understand this reasoning and I’m inclined to call BS on their given reason. They’ve been hard at work on multiple games and have released major games during other years with BlizzCon. The idea that this year may or may not have 3 Blizzard games feels a little ridiculous too. I have no doubt that the World of Warcraft expansion will release, but Heart of the Swarm has been surprisingly quiet. Diablo III feels like it will finally release sometime this year, but its anybodies guess as to when exactly. How does this feel any different from previous Blizzard years? Especially the ones where we thought the Diablo III release was immanent.
There’s a few other, possibly real reasons I’ll conjecture just since its fun to say the word “conjecture”:
- Ticket sales had actually decreased from 2010 to 2011, although not by much
- The cost of the event greatly out-paces ticket sales. At $175 a pop I don’t see how this is possible, but the marketing the event generates seems like it would be well worth it.
- And this is my biggest suspicion: there’s nothing new to show. Supposedly they are working on some new MMO project called “Titan”, but are keeping it under wraps for awhile until they are ready. Without that on the plate, we’ve pretty much seen everything already.
So there you go: no BlizzCon this year, maybe 3 new Blizzard games released in return. Its nothing to cough at, but I can feel for the fans who are understanably disappointed by this year’s non-showing. In return Blizzard is going to be hosting a major gaming tournament in Asia later this year.
