Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed that any plans for an in-person Blizzcon 2021 event have been cancelled due to the continued uncertainty over coronavirus measures. The company is now planning on holding a global event at the start of 2022 instead.
Blizzcon is usually held in California. Because the guidelines for gatherings are still changing there and new variants of coronavirus continue to emerge worldwide, the team decided it was best not to hold an in-person event this year. The global event that is now planned for early 2022 will be a combination of an online digital show similar to BlizzConline 2021 and smaller in-person gatherings. The full statement can be seen below:
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.
This will be the second year the event has been cancelled after coronavirus also put paid to BlizzCon 2020. The subsequent online-only event, appropriately titled BlizzConline, in February 2021 saw the launch of Blizzard Arcade Collection, as well as providing more details for Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV. We can expect next year’s event to be something similar.