There’ll be no physical BlizzCon this year, confirms Blizzard

Blizzard has confirmed that there won’t be an in-person BlizzCon event in 2024, with the usual annual festival taking another year off from having a physical presence thanks mainly to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

In an announcement on the BlizzCon website,  executive producer of the event Saralyn Smith wrote: “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,” Smith continued. “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.”

Last year’s Blizzcon event of course, also did not take place and instead became BlizzCon Online, eventually taking place in February of this year. The event saw the reveal of the upcoming Diablo II: Resurrected due for later this year, and showcased more of Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 too. It certainly looks like those last two will be a big part of the upcoming festivities, with both not scheduled to release until 2024, though we did get a developer livestream of Overwatch 2′s PVP modes just last week.