After three years without a singles event, BlizzCon aims to return in 2023. Los Angeles Times In a statement released today, Blizzard President Mike Ybarra said the company is working hard to bring the live event back next year, led by April McGee, who joined Blizzard last February after more than 20 years at Microsoft.
“We previously announced that we would be pausing BlissCon while it reassessed the future, but we wanted to get back to a live event that would help us celebrate with the community,” Ybarra said. “We are committed to bringing BlizzCon back in 2023.”
From 2005 to 2019, BlizzCon was an annual Blizzard-hosted conference that hosted fans and returned with new game announcements, previews, or other types of programming around the company’s game library. In 2020, the in-person event has been canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with a virtual celebration going online. The following year, Blizzard canceled the event again due to the pandemic.
Blizzard initially planned for this year’s BlizzCon online event, but in late 2021, the company announced that the event had been cancelled. At the time, Blizzard said the event would be “reimagined” in the future – a sentiment Ybarra echoed in his interview.
The cancellation comes months after several lawsuits were filed against parent company Activision Blizzard, one of which is Both gender discrimination and sexual harassment occurred in Blizzard. However, the company has not said publicly that there is a link between the lawsuits and the event’s cancellation.
Recently, Blizzard faced a microtransaction execution audit in Diablo Immortal. A few weeks after launch, the game was reported to exist $24 million in revenue generated from microtransactions Single.