Blizzard Announces That BlizzCon 2021 is Officially Cancelled

Chalk up yet another gaming event delayed or cancelled thanks to the pandemic: Blizzard today announced it’s not going to be holding an in-person BlizzCon event — or any BlizzCon event, for that matter, in 2021. Instead, it’s going to be holding an in-person event some time in early 2022, a combination digital show and small in-person events.

Blizzard said the primary reason for the cancellation is the COVID-19 pandemic, which it says makes planning such a big event — “an epic and complex affair” — as BlizzCon prohibitively difficult. Saralyn Smith, Executive Producer of BlizzCon, said the lack of certainty about the future means the company can’t hold the event: “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.”

To make up for not holding the event this year, Blizzard says it’s going to be holding “ 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.” Given that it held BlizzConline this February, I’d peg that as the tentative date for this show, though it’s not clear when the smaller in-person gatherings will be held.

Given that Blizzard’s next two big games, Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4, won’t be releasing this year, it’s probably a good thing we won’t be getting more footage of games we won’t be playing for months at the earliest. In the meantime, we can content ourselves with more World of Warcraft Classic updates, Overwatch events, and Diablo 2: Resurrected, with the latter still having a tentative release date of sometime on or before December 2021.

Source: Blizzard