In an announcement that caught some by surprise, Blizzard suddenly announced this week that the 2024 edition of BlizzCon is cancelled. Citing that the company is approaching 2024 different than its previous years, Blizzard announced the cancellation but affirmed that it would have games and announcements for the future. The most notable possible announcements being World of Warcraft: The War Within and Vessel of Hatred, Diablo IV's first expansion pack. Likewise, the company's press release stated that the event will still be planned for the future. Blizzard has cancelled BlizzCon prior to the COVID-19 pandemic due to a lack of compelling game announcements in the past. For example BlizzCon 2012 was not held for that exact reason.

However, this will be the first time the event has been cancelled while Blizzard is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. It is not exactly "breaking news" that BlizzCon has been a passion project of Blizzard's senior management and staff and been a loss leader almost every single year it has been held. For example, way back in 2009 Tor Thorson, who passed away in 2021, reported that BlizzCon 2009 incurred a 'substantial loss' even with massive sponsorship deals and excitement for StarCraft II at an all-time high. Furthermore, in-person developer-led fan events are a bit of a dying breed. QuakeCon is still going strong, but that event has a tournament to hitch itself to, whereas BlizzCon errs more towards an enthusiast-oriented event. It doesn't help that last year's event was poorly received and Blizzard's portfolio of upcoming releases are not as compelling as you'd hope. And with Microsoft already writing off about $120 million thanks to the demise of the Overwatch League, you can also imagine that this year's BlizzCon might have been on the chopping block at the start of 2024.

Also, let's not deny that developers and publishers just aren't excited about hosting or attending in-person conventions anymore. E3 is dead and Nintendo is pulling out of Gamescom, one of the few remaining industry pillars in the convention arena not aligned with Geoff Keighley. So, do you even buy Blizzard's promise that there will be a BlizzCon 2025? For how long did we hear out the ESA promising that E3 would be coming back even though we all knew it was completely dead in the water?

I'm probably 50/50 on whether there will ever be another Blizzcon, and my guess is that not even the people at Blizzard really know for sure. I think it will depend on a number of factors, including whether Blizzard ever puts together a compelling slate of games, if they ever have another game as hot as Overwatch or Starcraft, and just the general state of Xbox and in person events.

It's kind of hard for me to imagine Blizzard ever putting out another game that takes the world by storm the way that WOW or Overwatch did, but then again Overwatch was hard to imagine before that came out. It seems to me that Blizzard is more of a legacy company at this point, relying on its old tried and true IPs and legacy live service games and not really having the energy to put out a lot of new stuff. But that may not be the case forever and if they have another huge hit or one of their legacy games gets hot I could see Blizzcon returning.

On the other hand maybe in person events will continue to fade and the new Blizzard leadership won't care enough to put together the monumental expense. And it also probably depends on how Xbox is doing at the time. If Xbox is riding high and making a lot of money they will probably give more latitude to subsidiaries to spend. It's a bad look to spend a bunch of money on a party after you cut 8% of your workforce though, and I think that might be a large part of why there won't be an event this year. "We're spending $5 million on a convention that could have paid the salaries and benefits for 25 of my colleagues who got axed?"

(sorry for the long post. I didn't intend for it to be this long. I've played Starcraft 2 and thus followed Blizzard fairly closely for a long time now so it's something I have more thoughts on)

It's hard to say. Blizzard games are still quite popular and have a diehard audience that would go to an event like that, especially if they went back to having tournament finals at it. The fact that events like Tennocon still exist and do well suggest that Blizzard could put on Blizzcon-like events, even if they were more modest, and probably draw a crowd since they also have a heavily devoted audience. This being the first year under Microsoft ownership and what I imagine are a lot of changes behind the scenes happening also making a Blizzcon probably a lot more work than normal too. I could see them coming back next year once the ship has settled back on course a bit and their direction under Microsoft is set.

On the other hand though, Blizzard hasn't really put out a true hit new game in approaching a decade now. Most of their current games are coasting on their popularity and from what I've seen, not really growing all that much. The other thing here is that the competitive Blizzard games already have in-person competitions that replicate a Blizzcon-like experience for the hardcore fans (IEM, etc. have events that Blizzard games are still part of. Despite fewer people playing Starcraft 2 than a few years back, the game still gets great viewership numbers and as a result has been a fixture of all of the big competitive game events for a long time now, for example. This is unlikely to change any time soon). When these competitive games were more popular, often their end of year final tournaments would take place at Blizzcon. Blizzard eventually stopped making the efforts for this to be possible and as a result the tournament holders do their own things instead.

The giant question mark here also is Microsoft. Under Microsoft, similar titles like Age of Empires 2 have had a massive resurgence in popularity after getting support from Microsoft to be developed, run tournaments, have dedicated online infrastructure, etc.. Given that most of the main online Blizzard titles are more popular than AOE2, even a small-to-moderate investment from Microsoft could help them out a ton and bring Blizzard games back in a big way. Before the potential Microsoft acquisition and after Morhaime left, Activision management were basically neglecting Blizzard and were putting the squeeze on them and their continued support of their online and competitive games since those games didn't make Call of Duty or Candy Crush money. During this time, Blizzard's contributions to prize pools and support in their competitive games dropped massively and they were being forced to cut back on the in-person and online events that catered to their hardcore audience. Activision were fully in squeezing water from a stone mode with Blizzard and trying to force a shrinking staff to support their games while spending the bare minimum to maintain or patch them (for example, SC2's multiplayer ladder was broken for a huge amount of time and most APIs related to the game didn't function for a long time. This has now been fixed). This approach started to change around the time Activision started being looked at for sale to Microsoft since ABK wanted to make their portfolio more appealing. As an example, after several years of neglect, suddenly the sole intern keeping the SC2 servers from imploding got budget to actually fix the myriad issues with the game's online service along with other other meaningful things and as a result the game has had several balance patches that have been hugely popular which has brought back a lot of players and attracted new ones. I'm now a WoW person, but from what I've heard, the community has been relatively happy with how things have been handled with the game lately as well compared to a few years back. The games started doing better once they stopped being starved of funding so if Microsoft keeps this up, there is the potential for them to make a comeback.

Blizzard's games are still good and with the right investment, I do think the company could make a comeback. They're no longer the neglected middle sibling of ABK and from what I've read, substantial change has been happening at Blizzard. It's been enough that people like the oldschool streamer Day9, one of the people who popularized Starcraft 2 (and Hearthstone) and in a way Twitch-style game streaming in general, has ended his 5+ year boycott of the company (he boycotted Blizzard after all of the bad news came out about Kotick and awful things going on at Blizzard came out. He knows lots of people at and around the company so he must have heard enough good to change his mind).

I think you're less likely to see events like these as a yearly thing and more on a "when it's ready, it's ready" schedule, meaning when they have things to announce and they can provide a loaded show, sure, they'll put something on, because why not? Bring on a few dozen influencers willing to shill to pretend to be hyped up, sucker in your remaining fans, and bam, PR. The events themselves might lose money but as a long-form source of fan goodwill, it has to still have some meaning. Just maybe not every year. Give it some impact, put it on every three years or something like that, and you're good.

Or save it for Microsoft's big pressers, which is probably more likely.

I'm not surprised, Diablo IV turned out to be a huge disappointment. The main campaign is okay, but inferior to Diablo III, IMO. And the end game stuff seems to be severely lacking. And then finally admitting Overwatch 2 will have no PvE exclusive content has rightfully made a lot of people angry, because they feel they've been lied to. So yeah, them doing a BlizzCon this year could've been a disaster. Especially, with really nothing new from them to announce gaming wise. The show would pretty much be them trying to justify players continuing to play Diablo IV and Overwatch 2, and this wouldn't go over well.

Will there be another one in the future? Possibly, but only after Blizzard is able to regain much of the goodwill they lost. Maybe releasing a new game that blows people away, or fixing their current flagship games to be much better than what they are, which they don't seem eager to do.

Blizzard, how the mighty have fallen.