When I first read that BlizzCon/BlizzConline was cancelled I shrugged and didn’t really think about it. But then I saw Wilhelm and Redbeard and a few more people comment on it.
The idea of a studio-owned (gaming) convention has always been a bit weird to me. Sure, we had the Games Convention here in Germany and I even attended once, but it was overall video game show, maybe comparable with PAX East, but bigger? No idea, that’s not the point. Even though I pretty much exclusively played WoW between 2006 and 2014, the thought to go to a WoW convention never even crossed my mind. I mean, I’m no stranger to tech conferences and more than once I went out of my own pocket, not just on my employer’s budget. I also know (know as in direct personal friends, or guildies) zero people who ever went there, but I guess that’s because it was in California. Maybe would’ve been different if it was in London, Paris, or Berlin.
I also never went to anything WoW-related in particular, I guess that comes with playing on EU servers and having people from all over Europe, from what I heard German guilds did more meetups, or if you had a lot of people in close proximity, say in the UK or the Netherlands (both countries where I had a ton of guildies). Only now I’ve been in a German WoW guild for a few months, and I was onboarded by real life friends.
I’ve entertained the thought of going to an EVE meetup if the pandemic allows, and I guess I’d go to Amsterdam or London for that, maybe it’s a little different if you can potentially meet anyone you’ve ever encountered ingame, thanks to a single server.
This rant was neither here or there, but I guess for most of us Europeans BlizzCon was never a real thing anyway, because there was no chance to attend. And by the time the virtual tickets came, most people had lost interest in the game anyway. EVE Vegas is a bit of the same, I don’t think there are a ton of Europeans attending, but somehow again the draw is bigger and EVE seems to have a generally older population who might just decide to put their vacation budget on this.
I always got the impression that Blizz created BlizzCon so they could control the narrative all the way through, which was something that they couldn’t do with E3 and other sorts of gaming cons. Oh well.
True, but I guess I was pretty much oblivious to the narrative most of the time. If I like the game, I’ll play it – but I’m not even more likely to look at a new game just because it’s from Blizzard.