Our extremely good, close and personal best buds over at CNET – we’re on speed dial, obvs) are reporting the cancellation of premiere gaming convention BLIZZCON 2020, a celebration of everything Blizzard Entertainment, that was scheduled to take place this November in Southern California.
Last year, the annual show set up camp at the Anaheim Convention Center but, in the wake of the current COVID-19 pandemic, Saralyn Smith, the Executive Producer of the event, has announced on the BlizzCon homepage that they have had to make the ‘very difficult decision’ to not run the show this November.
“We’re feeling deeply disappointed about this decision, and imagine many of you will feel the same. I truly love BlizzCon, and I know that’s a sentiment shared by everyone at Blizzard. We will sorely miss connecting with so many of you at the convention and “recharging our geek batteries” this fall”, Saralyn says in the statement.
“But we will meet again!”, she reminds fans.
Saralyn then goes on to suggest that BlizzCon could be taken online, in much the same way that E3 did a few weeks ago. But fans would have to wait some time for such a setup to be introduced: “We’d want to do this as soon as we could, but given that this is new-ish territory and the different factors involved, it will most likely be sometime early next year.”
A big element of BlizzCon is also a high-profile eSports competition, featuring Blizzard games such as World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone and Diablo, so the statement also suggests online alternatives could be on the cards.
We’ll keep our eyes and ears open for further developments but this is one of the bigger events of the convention calendar to cancel and certainly one of the later ones in the timetable. The world may be looking to getting back to some kind of normality in the next few months but Blizzard feels that maybe that’s not quite the case…
