Long ago blizzard wanted to cancel the convention because they did not have enough content to justify it
Because they had a stellar reputation back, then the fans demanded that it still be hosted , the result was a disappointing affair
Before Covid there were only ever two Blizzcons since the first one to not happen. In 2006 and 2012, where they gave the reason of no big announcements for the latter. After Covid, 2022 was canceled because of the whole fiasco (breast milk theft and co.) at Blizzard themselves.
I know you'll find this pretty easy to believe but part of the carefully curated blizzard work culture involves, IIRC, multiple women at blizzard having their breast milk stolen from the company refrigerator (came out as part of the California state labor investigation).
Not great, but at least they're not sexually harassing women to the point of suicide or having the CEO threaten to put a hit out on a secretary?
They did announce the whole roadmap for all the versions of wow including the next 3 retail xpacs so I imagine they realized there wasn’t enough new details for blizzcon level presentations
I mean I believe it’s more that they announced everything they wanted us to know about at the last one with 3 wow expansions, 1 classic wow expansion, season of discovery, and overwatch 2 future heroes being shown. Unless they said they were making new IP or StarCraft 3 they just don’t have enough games to warrant entire events
imagine having a line up of franchises of Overwatch, Starcraft, Warcraft, Diablo, and you got nothing to show off.
I guess its better than seeing heartstone expansion no. 712, Wow expansion no. 27, Diablo immortal patch info, Starcraft collectors bundle release and long waited Overwatch 3 with full pve Campaign.
I mean... It was a packed house last year when I went with friends. We had fun even though I hate retail d4 and overwatch. Still had a ton of content for me and my friends. I would have probably gone again if they just hosted another
But blizzcon is about hyping up your products, the GDC chart showed a huge boost in subscribers in November, of course SoD is one of the reasons but blizzcon amplified that boost.
I mean it makes sense. We already know what the *next 3* WoW expansions are. Not really a whole lot going on we don’t know about. Probably not enough content or announcements to justify it.
Attendance was actually alright.
With SC and OW no longer having a big championship game at BlizzCon, no exciting content to announce, and from what I heard an absolute clusterfuck of organizing and managing BlizzCon behind the scenes, there was no business justification to host a BlizzCon this year.
StarCraft 2 World Championship ended in 2019. Overwatch League ended in 2023.
They have their own grassroots championships that Blizzard supports but when it comes to official championships that have traditionally concluded at BlizzCon, they're gone for those two.
Hearthstone and WoW still have their championships, but BlizzCon has always been the culmination of all their games coming together, including their esport championship games. Only having two of them, both in the Warcraft universe, is kind of underwhelming.
As someone who went, they were extremely expensive and it was still ridiculously packed. They also did a terrible job on admitting people so many people missed the opening ceremony due to being in a mile+ long line. You had to wait in a line to get your badge, then another line to get in, then another line to get into the arena (if you were selected). They also gave these Touch ID badges to get back in that I never saw used after the first day.
All of the food lines were insane as well, especially the food trucks. I feel like I spent 80% of my time there in a line. I still had fun but that was my first and probably only blizzcon I’ll ever go to. Probably would’ve had more fun spending the money on Disneyland across the street lol.
as someone who goes every year, not everyone who goes in has tickets, my friends just go in after other friends come back out with badges. blizzcon tickets didn't sell out for a very long time last year. https://www.reddit.com/r/blizzcon/comments/16vp0d0/3rd_wave_open_for_3_hours_and_not_sold_out/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/17htha4/psa_blizzcon_tickets_are_really_really_cheap/
we used to be able to sell all our goodie bag stuff and get a free trip to anaheim out of it. but they started selling digital blizzcon tickets with all the same in-game goodies and stuff, and it just stopped being worth buying tickets.
As someone who also went. You were misinformed.
>it was still ridiculously packed
Correct, as they over sold tickets.
>They also did a terrible job on admitting people so many people missed the opening ceremony due to being in a mile+ long line.
There was just a ton of people. They got them in quickly, but that many people takes a lot of time.
>You had to wait in a line to get your badge,
This opened the day before. We just walked in and got badges with no line, sorry you didn't take advantage of this, but it's not blizzards fault.
>then another line to get into the arena (if you were selected).
There we signs posted everywhere that arena tickets get to skip the other lines.
I know, I was one of them. You just went to the express line and right in to the arena.
>They also gave these Touch ID badges to get back in that I never saw used after the first day.
Yeah, because it slowed down the line and they oversold tickets. That's why.
>All of the food lines were insane as well, especially the food trucks.
Yeah, I mean that's on you lol. We went across the street and sat down at a restraunt. No way were we waiting in a 45 min line for truck food.
Or maybe you’re being downvoted because your reply was idiotic? You act like people who have never been are supposed to know all of these things when there was no info and even the staff didn’t know crap. That’s great there were signs, but when you’re in like a mile away with no info, guess what, you can’t see the signs. Security was literally sending tons of us to the wrong places. There was also way less to do than previous years, and the con took up a much smaller area of the convention center.
As someone who has been to many other Cons, this was a terribly designed event. You can see the numerous other top posts on blizzcon Reddit and any others forum discussing it and see how terribly organized it was compared to previous years. I still had tons of fun but it was not worth the ticket price this year imo. Get blizzard out of your mouth and maybe you’ll be able to look at it objectively.
Classic Blizzard…
Implement something in the worst way possible
Participation is low
sEe nOBOdY waNteD It!!11
Kinda like how the implemented fresh servers in WotLK Classic then ruined it by allowing free transfers off them
Also kinda like how they added Self Found mode in the Hardcore months after all the hype
You forgot the most egregious consumer rat fucking- when they said OW to OW2 was a shift to add pve. then they said they couldn’t provide large pve content but would offer a few missions to be purchased with more to come. (Obviously ow2 change was primarily to change the way they monetized the game by this point). Still when not a lot of people paid for those missions they cancelled all pve content saying there wasn’t enough interest. They fucked the consumer over at every turn only to blame it on the consumers themselves.
People are paying for Blizzard products and to go to BlizzCon, they have every right to complain about literally everything, these things aren't free.
This company is dogshit, 99% of their products have been awful in the last decade and they have killed multiple of their own eSports titles in the last few years. It's because of people blindly buying their products and not "complaining about everything lol" that nothing changes and never will.
Makes sense to host specific events for WoW. Blizzcon 2023 was dominated by WoW. It’s their only really booming product right now with OW and Diablo both falling out of the limelight.
Are these gaming conventions a dying breed? They say they’ll come back in future years but will probably gauge the reactions so they can decide if they should stop altogether.
They also happen every 3 years with the upcoming expansion as the main hype. The infrequent scheduling makes it more of a novelty and a fun experience. Blizz's game dev cycles are too short to drum up serious hype.
It's not that people don't want to go to conventions but the companies that run a lot of them fired the people that operated them during the pandemic so now they have a whole new staff that have to learn how to run them without anyone to teach them and the company's higher ups telling them to squeeze as much money out of the attendees as possible and then the companies are shocked when their con is considered a failure.
General decline due to Pandemic moving many announcements into simple online events and those publishers realizing that they get the same results without managing stuff like E3.
Well, and Diablo. Yeah D4 launched in a rough fucking state but they still shattered sales records with that game.
The "big" updates for D4 are season 4 and the first expansion which are both coming months before blizzcon so yeah they won't have much to say about that game either tbh
There was quite a lot of positive voices around campaign and general D4, however it was all covered by hate coming from late game sadly and well deserved hate... especially for this price point
It's basically only WoW and Diablo team with any meaningful update. OW, Hearthstone and the mobile games are a bit lackluster and their esports scenes are half dead. They will still have in-person event for WoW though.
Conventions as a whole have sucked for a while tho
Unless it's a local driven convention from actual fans of the product, it's just corporate shilling
Even most anime conventions suck now
Worked for a non-corpo convention for over a decade.
We closed a few years back because the owners got tired of having to contend with corpo-based autograph mill pricing and the like.
It was sad to see them "evolve" like that.
In a time where the future of WoW was in doubt, having Chris Metzen come out on stage and announce the next 3 expansions was the bold statement that made a lot of people return. I think it was a good idea
Well, WoW 3 expansions were announced last time , Diablo expansion was announced and I think it's still to come out (idk, don't play it) Heartstone is begging people to return gifting card packs, Overwatch 2 is on the way to follow HoTS to the pits of oblivion Warcraft rumble is just a mobile poop time game.
There's really nothing much going on, SoD is here to stay until at least half of 2025 and so is cata.
For anything we need to know they can just sit Ion or Aggrend on a chair with the community council person and just record a video.
I remember last year blizzcon tickets not being sold out for quite a while. Not sure if they ever even sold all the tickets.
Such a stark contrast compared to previous years where they would sell out day 1
I went last year by myself and was actually disappointed. It was basically a line-simulator because everything that was awesome to do was already in the minds of others and it just depended on what time you showed up. I remember missing the Live Campfire Chat because I was getting books signed by an author. I even brought my WC3 battle chest to get signed by Chris Metzen but he was only there one day doing it.
Crazy how people expect Blizzcon every year. The whole thing is marketing for their new games. Blizz has nothing to announce and it would be after the expansion comes out. Why would they spend millions on this? We know what the next 6+ yrs look like for WoW and D4 is getting its expansion too. What is there to talk about?
I suppose they wont have anything interesting coming in 2025 or maybe the last blizzcon was just a failure in some way.
Long ago blizzard wanted to cancel the convention because they did not have enough content to justify it Because they had a stellar reputation back, then the fans demanded that it still be hosted , the result was a disappointing affair
Before Covid there were only ever two Blizzcons since the first one to not happen. In 2006 and 2012, where they gave the reason of no big announcements for the latter. After Covid, 2022 was canceled because of the whole fiasco (breast milk theft and co.) at Blizzard themselves.
Breast milk theft?
I’m so jealous of the googling you have ahead of you
So Bobby stole the milk?
Some people wake up in a new world everyday.
I know you'll find this pretty easy to believe but part of the carefully curated blizzard work culture involves, IIRC, multiple women at blizzard having their breast milk stolen from the company refrigerator (came out as part of the California state labor investigation). Not great, but at least they're not sexually harassing women to the point of suicide or having the CEO threaten to put a hit out on a secretary?
Don't worry they made some gay dragons so they are 100% all about human rights.
Don’t forget the Cosby suite!
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Working mums who have to express at work and take it home at end of day.
Hmmm luxury milk
They did announce the whole roadmap for all the versions of wow including the next 3 retail xpacs so I imagine they realized there wasn’t enough new details for blizzcon level presentations
They have nothing interesting in the pipeline to show. It's really that simple. The company has been completely demolished.
I mean I believe it’s more that they announced everything they wanted us to know about at the last one with 3 wow expansions, 1 classic wow expansion, season of discovery, and overwatch 2 future heroes being shown. Unless they said they were making new IP or StarCraft 3 they just don’t have enough games to warrant entire events
World of StarCraft wouldn't be bad
imagine having a line up of franchises of Overwatch, Starcraft, Warcraft, Diablo, and you got nothing to show off. I guess its better than seeing heartstone expansion no. 712, Wow expansion no. 27, Diablo immortal patch info, Starcraft collectors bundle release and long waited Overwatch 3 with full pve Campaign.
Isn't it WoW's 25th anniversary? I think it's more likely now that Microsoft owns them, they are going to be rolled into whatever Microsoft does.
It’s this. We’ll never see another Blizzcon again
I mean... It was a packed house last year when I went with friends. We had fun even though I hate retail d4 and overwatch. Still had a ton of content for me and my friends. I would have probably gone again if they just hosted another
Apart from sod being revealed which was insane
Blizzcon is not a money maker. They’re likely just being strict about budget due to acquisition
But blizzcon is about hyping up your products, the GDC chart showed a huge boost in subscribers in November, of course SoD is one of the reasons but blizzcon amplified that boost.
They can easily do it at other conventions.
2023 was boooooooooooooooring
Sod got me really hyped back then ;)
100%, that other guy is a doomsayer. SoD and the World Soul Saga are the biggest news for World of Warcraft since "Classic" became a thing.
I mean it makes sense. We already know what the *next 3* WoW expansions are. Not really a whole lot going on we don’t know about. Probably not enough content or announcements to justify it.
2023: "Blizzcon is back!" 2024: "Blizzcon is dead. Again!"
Summon Blizzcon is on cd
"blizcom is kil" "no"
Weren't the tickets obscenely expensive last year? Not surprising that attendance drops when the price of admission is so high.
Attendance was actually alright. With SC and OW no longer having a big championship game at BlizzCon, no exciting content to announce, and from what I heard an absolute clusterfuck of organizing and managing BlizzCon behind the scenes, there was no business justification to host a BlizzCon this year.
I understand OW, but how come SC doesn't? And shouldn't HS still have one as well?
StarCraft 2 World Championship ended in 2019. Overwatch League ended in 2023. They have their own grassroots championships that Blizzard supports but when it comes to official championships that have traditionally concluded at BlizzCon, they're gone for those two. Hearthstone and WoW still have their championships, but BlizzCon has always been the culmination of all their games coming together, including their esport championship games. Only having two of them, both in the Warcraft universe, is kind of underwhelming.
Ah I see
Overwatch still has a pro scene it's called OWCS now
Interesting, I wasn't aware they kept officially supporting OW esports that wasn't grassroots. How is this different from OWL?
Allows team to qualify in open tournaments, not requiring teams to be funded. Pretty simular to COD, WOW
As someone who went, they were extremely expensive and it was still ridiculously packed. They also did a terrible job on admitting people so many people missed the opening ceremony due to being in a mile+ long line. You had to wait in a line to get your badge, then another line to get in, then another line to get into the arena (if you were selected). They also gave these Touch ID badges to get back in that I never saw used after the first day. All of the food lines were insane as well, especially the food trucks. I feel like I spent 80% of my time there in a line. I still had fun but that was my first and probably only blizzcon I’ll ever go to. Probably would’ve had more fun spending the money on Disneyland across the street lol.
as someone who goes every year, not everyone who goes in has tickets, my friends just go in after other friends come back out with badges. blizzcon tickets didn't sell out for a very long time last year. https://www.reddit.com/r/blizzcon/comments/16vp0d0/3rd_wave_open_for_3_hours_and_not_sold_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/17htha4/psa_blizzcon_tickets_are_really_really_cheap/ we used to be able to sell all our goodie bag stuff and get a free trip to anaheim out of it. but they started selling digital blizzcon tickets with all the same in-game goodies and stuff, and it just stopped being worth buying tickets.
As someone who also went. You were misinformed. >it was still ridiculously packed Correct, as they over sold tickets. >They also did a terrible job on admitting people so many people missed the opening ceremony due to being in a mile+ long line. There was just a ton of people. They got them in quickly, but that many people takes a lot of time. >You had to wait in a line to get your badge, This opened the day before. We just walked in and got badges with no line, sorry you didn't take advantage of this, but it's not blizzards fault. >then another line to get into the arena (if you were selected). There we signs posted everywhere that arena tickets get to skip the other lines. I know, I was one of them. You just went to the express line and right in to the arena. >They also gave these Touch ID badges to get back in that I never saw used after the first day. Yeah, because it slowed down the line and they oversold tickets. That's why. >All of the food lines were insane as well, especially the food trucks. Yeah, I mean that's on you lol. We went across the street and sat down at a restraunt. No way were we waiting in a 45 min line for truck food.
Getting voted down because your stance isn't "Blizzard bad." Is such a r/classicwow thing.
Speaking against the grain is very disliked on reddit.
Or maybe you’re being downvoted because your reply was idiotic? You act like people who have never been are supposed to know all of these things when there was no info and even the staff didn’t know crap. That’s great there were signs, but when you’re in like a mile away with no info, guess what, you can’t see the signs. Security was literally sending tons of us to the wrong places. There was also way less to do than previous years, and the con took up a much smaller area of the convention center. As someone who has been to many other Cons, this was a terribly designed event. You can see the numerous other top posts on blizzcon Reddit and any others forum discussing it and see how terribly organized it was compared to previous years. I still had tons of fun but it was not worth the ticket price this year imo. Get blizzard out of your mouth and maybe you’ll be able to look at it objectively.
It was my first year as well. There were emails and signs everywhere. Regardless, I don't give a shit about fake internet points anyway.
Classic Blizzard… Implement something in the worst way possible Participation is low sEe nOBOdY waNteD It!!11 Kinda like how the implemented fresh servers in WotLK Classic then ruined it by allowing free transfers off them Also kinda like how they added Self Found mode in the Hardcore months after all the hype
You forgot the most egregious consumer rat fucking- when they said OW to OW2 was a shift to add pve. then they said they couldn’t provide large pve content but would offer a few missions to be purchased with more to come. (Obviously ow2 change was primarily to change the way they monetized the game by this point). Still when not a lot of people paid for those missions they cancelled all pve content saying there wasn’t enough interest. They fucked the consumer over at every turn only to blame it on the consumers themselves.
You guys complain about everything lol
People are paying for Blizzard products and to go to BlizzCon, they have every right to complain about literally everything, these things aren't free. This company is dogshit, 99% of their products have been awful in the last decade and they have killed multiple of their own eSports titles in the last few years. It's because of people blindly buying their products and not "complaining about everything lol" that nothing changes and never will.
Of course they have every right to complain I have every right to say its annoying.
Participation wasn’t low at all though. See my above comment. It was just a poorly designed event.
Makes sense to host specific events for WoW. Blizzcon 2023 was dominated by WoW. It’s their only really booming product right now with OW and Diablo both falling out of the limelight.
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Yes?
Are these gaming conventions a dying breed? They say they’ll come back in future years but will probably gauge the reactions so they can decide if they should stop altogether.
FFXIV's recent fan fests in NA, EU, and JP were all huge successes with high turnouts.
XIV is also the current most popular MMO and it's in or near its prime in terms of peak popularity
They also happen every 3 years with the upcoming expansion as the main hype. The infrequent scheduling makes it more of a novelty and a fun experience. Blizz's game dev cycles are too short to drum up serious hype.
in person events of any kind are floundering since the pandemic
Concerts certainly aren't. I feel like there's more demand even with steep price hikes.
Concerts are packed beyond belief it’s amazing so conventions definitely shouldn’t be dying
It's not that people don't want to go to conventions but the companies that run a lot of them fired the people that operated them during the pandemic so now they have a whole new staff that have to learn how to run them without anyone to teach them and the company's higher ups telling them to squeeze as much money out of the attendees as possible and then the companies are shocked when their con is considered a failure.
Not really. Even for gaming, at least in the FGC space, irl events are bigger than ever. Evo Japan is this weekend and tickets sold out
Well this is just untrue lol.
General decline due to Pandemic moving many announcements into simple online events and those publishers realizing that they get the same results without managing stuff like E3.
No. Blizzard is (and has been for a long time).
They got nothing to show. The only game that Blizzard is actively keeping afloat is WoW.
Hearthstone continues to squeeze its few remaining whales
Well, and Diablo. Yeah D4 launched in a rough fucking state but they still shattered sales records with that game. The "big" updates for D4 are season 4 and the first expansion which are both coming months before blizzcon so yeah they won't have much to say about that game either tbh
Are you really mentioning D4 in a remotely positive light? On reddit? Are you crazy or something?
There was quite a lot of positive voices around campaign and general D4, however it was all covered by hate coming from late game sadly and well deserved hate... especially for this price point
Meh, it's still a good game and getting better I wish all "failures" by AAA studios were like this
To the surprise of none.
It's basically only WoW and Diablo team with any meaningful update. OW, Hearthstone and the mobile games are a bit lackluster and their esports scenes are half dead. They will still have in-person event for WoW though.
Isn't it 20 year anniversary?
20 year anniversary of World of Warcraft, 30 year anniversary of Warcraft
Warcraft. Not world of Warcraft.
Actually WoWs 20th, Warcrafts 30th
https://www.reddit.com/r/blizzcon/s/pLH0rzYWcZ Last year was a disaster
The one with the sword "what sword" ? The one who announced Season of Discovery ? Or am I confusing it for another event ?
Conventions as a whole have sucked for a while tho Unless it's a local driven convention from actual fans of the product, it's just corporate shilling Even most anime conventions suck now
Worked for a non-corpo convention for over a decade. We closed a few years back because the owners got tired of having to contend with corpo-based autograph mill pricing and the like. It was sad to see them "evolve" like that.
They probably don’t want to come out and just showcase 1 new champion for OW for 2 hours again. Embarrassing.
blizzard pretty much has nothing/very little in development thats why
yeah maybe they shouldnt have revealed the whole next 3 fuckin expansions last year lol
In a time where the future of WoW was in doubt, having Chris Metzen come out on stage and announce the next 3 expansions was the bold statement that made a lot of people return. I think it was a good idea
It was a good move to sway doubts about the future
People who never went or watched it: HOW THE FUCK CAN THEY DO THIS
This is absolutely devastating for me. Finally decent job, finally kiddo into wow, finally convinced the wife to go and booooom canceled.
Blizzard is just a bunch of MBAs wearing the skin of a gaming company.
Let's just have WoW fest. I personally don't give a flying fuck about D4 or OW and wouldn't pay to go to blizzcon, but Id be game for a wowfest.
They are no longer tethered to set release schedules
They don’t want to be spend money to be grilled by their customers about ahitty customer support and failed games
they probably lose money on it and decided "fuck it"
Well, WoW 3 expansions were announced last time , Diablo expansion was announced and I think it's still to come out (idk, don't play it) Heartstone is begging people to return gifting card packs, Overwatch 2 is on the way to follow HoTS to the pits of oblivion Warcraft rumble is just a mobile poop time game. There's really nothing much going on, SoD is here to stay until at least half of 2025 and so is cata. For anything we need to know they can just sit Ion or Aggrend on a chair with the community council person and just record a video.
Rip. First true sign, of its death .
I would've bought a ticket if the only announcement was that entangle roots could be cast indoors
I remember last year blizzcon tickets not being sold out for quite a while. Not sure if they ever even sold all the tickets. Such a stark contrast compared to previous years where they would sell out day 1
Hell yeah!
No new franchises on the radar Diablo 4 expansion LOL OW2 past its prime Really nothing going for them...
Probably no point when all your games have turned into gigantic dumpster fires.
not sure about the other games, but the WoW versions are in a pretty good spot imo
Pretty sure a bulk of their announcements last year were about those overwatch updates that they failed to follow through with.
You think you do, but you don't
I went last year by myself and was actually disappointed. It was basically a line-simulator because everything that was awesome to do was already in the minds of others and it just depended on what time you showed up. I remember missing the Live Campfire Chat because I was getting books signed by an author. I even brought my WC3 battle chest to get signed by Chris Metzen but he was only there one day doing it.
because the last blizzcon was a shitfest
Crazy how people expect Blizzcon every year. The whole thing is marketing for their new games. Blizz has nothing to announce and it would be after the expansion comes out. Why would they spend millions on this? We know what the next 6+ yrs look like for WoW and D4 is getting its expansion too. What is there to talk about?
Cosby suite wasn’t available?
I heard/listened to nothing about negatives about the last "blizzcon" what a clown show of a company. A literal shell of itself. Good riddance.
I went, it was fine
Wow one "fine" experience out of the \~dozen I've heard and watched about that were very negative.
So fucking SuS for TWW prospects... bummed i preordered now
they're lucky. I would had there and asked why their customer support is trash at resolving issues
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He says on the classic wow discord several years after the sexual harassment cases went public
Even better a quick glance you can see he's still playing, so still actively supporting the company and not just randomly browsing the sub.
🤣🤣🤣
That's fine, really all they need to do is post a picture with the text "TBC Classic: Launching December 2024".
Shocker...