Well, we finally have the last pieces of the puzzle for the first Blizzcon post-pandemic (I hate this term because it is inaccurate, but also because it is the most succinct summary of our current public health policy state) and the first Blizzcon since the allegations of the lawsuits wedged against Blizzard and their parent company’s behavior were made public. November 3-4 of 2023, you can attend, if you buy a ticket on either July 8th or July 22nd of this year, at the eye-watering prices of $300 and $800 for the portal pass, respectively.

Blizzard faces…well, an uphill battle here, but also faces no real struggle. In perception, they will absolutely have to make good quickly and head off the worst issues, given that Blizzcon as an event was scrutinized in those lawsuits! In reality, though, there are enough nerds who will absolutely part with the high ticket prices to go. Well, most likely – the con is changing, and we’ll discuss that here today.

Firstly, Blizzard is putting a high amount of emphasis on how the experience is changing at Blizzcon for attendees. The home livestream is free! The con in-person will be more focused on “experiential” event choices, with a single main stage where all panels will now take place, with fewer seats than the typical configuration of Hall D (a nearly 5,000 person drop from 12,500ish to 7,500 seats). There are policy changes that are meeting with some controversy, like ticket limits per purchase, alcohol policy, and hours, and so let’s break those down and then talk about the overall mood.

More Experiential Entertainment

Blizzcons of the past have always been focused on info dumps. Blizzard announces a new game, new expansion, new content, and you go to a stage, sit down, and watch some developers and designers rattle off a slideshow about it. It’s not particularly entertaining, but it is informative and then you go and play a demo, provide feedback, shake developer hands, and move on with your day. If you like one Blizzard game, this is a fine arrangement – you can set your days around panel schedules, time in demo lines, wandering the game’s designated space in the halls, and hey – it feels pretty good. The literal second you like an additional Blizzard game, the schedule gets bad real quick. Two games worth of panels is hard, especially if both games are announcing a new large content drop at Blizzcon. 2019 was tough if you like WoW and Diablo, because you’ve got to make those Diablo IV panels but also hear all the early visions for Shadowlands, before it came along and did…well, all of that to WoW.

So what is Blizzard doing at this year’s event to make it more “experiential?” Well, so far…not much that we know of. They are limiting all panels to a single stage, meaning that panels will be rotating in and out, and they are limiting the show hours by cutting 3 hours per day off the tail end, closing at 7 PM instead of 10 PM. The notion here seems to be that by limiting panels, attendees will have more time to wander, which should then limit the need to stay open for later hours per day, and that is…a theory, but one that depends quite heavily on the schedule of panels and an individual attendees level of interest in the full Blizzard canon. Without knowing what lies in the expo halls and what there will be to do in the show when not watching events, I struggle to have too much excitement for that idea. A lot of what Blizzcon has given you to do in the past that isn’t panels or demos boils down either to eSports events (your mileage may vary, obviously) and spending money at a variety of shops, including merch, vendors, food lines, and literal real-life loot boxes at $50 a pop. There’s plenty to check out normally, don’t get me wrong, but panels helped to somewhat obscure the dystopian capitalist nightmare the show could be at its worst – don’t mind the people lined up in a snaking pattern for nearly a full mile because those loot boxes might have old WoW TCG card codes in them but most likely won’t, just head to your panel, play your demo, mind your own business!

For me as a long-time attendee who has been at almost every Blizzcon, I don’t buy it yet. If the game demos are larger slices of in-development expansions or content, if there are more fun little exhibits like 360 cameras or the Overwatch diner they had in 2018, then maybe it could work – but so much of Blizzcon as it existed before was built to funnel you into excitement and purchase of Blizzard games, or to push you into a line to buy an overpriced piece of merch or mystery box, and the fun little bits existed to pull your eyes away from the naked greed of much of the event. Making the biggest hall available for more area to put things could be nice…but those things could also be more-expensive loot boxes, a larger and more costly merch shop, or some other form of wallet extraction. It’s cynical of me to put it that way, sure – but I don’t think that cynicism is ill-founded.

The Policy Changes

Blizzard is targeting long-time attendee concerns and image management in one-shot by making a slate of policy changes for the show in-person. The first one is a reduction in hours, going from a 12-hour daily shift to 9 hours, closing the show 3 hours earlier on both days. This one is basically a non-factor, mostly – panels and events rarely ran past 7 PM except the marquee talent content on night one and the concert on night two, and with panels being pressed to a single stage and no confirmation of contest night or the concert returning, it’s too early to say much here. I will say that the longer hours were nice to explore the show floor, as a lot of attendees left for dinner and never came back that day, which allowed easier access to demo lines, vendor booths, and nice quiet moments in the various shop and purchase lines so you could breeze through and pick up your stuff. If the “experiential” nature of the show this year changes the pattern of a day at Blizzcon majorly, it might not be a bad thing. Even now, short of the marquee events, my only concern is literally just that the nice hours to check out high demand stuff are nuked this way, but maybe the event adjusts around it with a new schedule and the new approach. Maybe!

The second change is that the opening ceremony in-person is going to be a ticket lottery for access to the arena seating. In the past, getting into the opening ceremony was fucking obnoxious and filled with weird nerd grandstanding and conflict – real assholes would go in early, elbow and push their way into the main stage hall, throw a backpack or two down to mark out a block of like 20 seats, and then challenge anyone who came through and claim that the seats were “spoken for” because their friends and guildies were coming, even though half of them were still at breakfast at IHOP, two weren’t even awake, and four of them were staking out the merch line. It was up to you and your level of intro/extraversion and conflict management to decide how aggressively you wanted to challenge these seat-stealing douchebags, and for most, it was either you plop down wordlessly and put the ball in their court or move on and just find another seat because you don’t want to talk to that kind of person, which is a reasonable thing to want to avoid. The drawing will, hopefully, reduce this, as will having everything in the arena, which is access-controlled and can generally be counted out better to reduce the number of people milling about at the point no seats are available (as well as preventing access to the late-arriving jerks who had their selfish friend stake out a seat for them with an unknown ETA). I’m a fan of this change, if it isn’t clear, because I had more dumb conversations with seat-thieving shitheads than I care to recount over the years.

The ticketing change reduces the number of tickets a single attendee can purchase from 4 to 2. This change feels fairly obviously targeted at scalpers and bots, and while it’s not effective for most of these, it is the standard pointed solution to most such problems and does make it legitimately harder for individual and less-sophisticated scalpers to get more tickets. It also means groups like my old Blizzcon group need more people in line and through the line to get tickets – which feels bad, but it is just one of those things you end up dealing with for a hot-ticket event.

The biggest change, based solely on the number of angry (and often legitimately funny for their short-sightedness) posts I’ve had to read in the Blizzcon group on Facebook I am in, is a simple change. Blizzard will not be selling alcohol at the con and it is a designated alcohol-free event. In the past, you couldn’t carry in your drink of choice (save for those clever hacks with hidden drink pouches and whatnot), but Blizzard and the convention staff were happy to sell you $11 half-pints, and Blizzard quite often partnered with local Bottle Logic Brewery to have special beers made for the event, like the Thunderbrew or Murky beers.

I’m of two minds on this one. I think as a change, this is logical and well-targeted. Blizzard employees who were named in suits often drank heavily at these events, and the incidents documented in the lawsuits involved developers drinking on-site and partying with fans. Cutting off alcohol eliminates that altogether…mostly. While the event grounds are limited to the Anaheim Convention Center buildings and the courtyard immediately outside, what isn’t limited is the bars at the hotels next door, where most fans and developers often partied the hardest. The Cosby Suite was at the Hilton, whose bar is a raucous haze of booze and nerds for most of the week around the show. The Marriott bar was often quite popular as well, and both of these hotel bars usually got some of the Blizzard brews from Bottle Logic and sold at their bars.

So the change makes sense, but it also doesn’t eliminate the actual biggest place where people drink and party at Blizzcon. Buying beer in the con is a sucker’s game, you want to take a dollar or two off the sticker price and drink at the hotels instead, and the lobby often filled with the developers and designers from Blizzard. I’m sure the less public-facing part of all of this is that policy will be to have developers not mingle, and a big part of that will likely mean either having them go home at the end of the day (instead of putting them up in the hotels with the parties), and I would suspect that is a part of the reason behind the hours reduction for the show (ending earlier lets them send staff home and eliminates the logistical need to house them on-site).

Personally, I don’t much care about the lack of alcohol on-site. I’m not a big drinker, and while I did enjoy daydrinking at Blizzcon about one day of the two every time I went, it’s not a big deal and I think a lot of the people I’ve seen catastrophizing about it are blissfully ignorant (how do you follow Blizzard and NOT know why limited alcohol at BC is a good idea?!) or have a genuine problem (do you really actually need beer at Blizzcon to handle the show, or are you self-medicating in a very bad way?). I will miss the special edition beers (assuming they aren’t doing one anyways), and I will miss the random chats I got to have with some high-up WoW team members (I talked through the design of the first boss in Shrine of the Storm with the dungeon team at Blizzcon 2017 and gave some input and ideas, which was a very cool experience), but it’s probably a good call and almost certainly a needed one. You’ll likely still be able to party at the bars and I doubt the overall tone and tenor of the area surrounding the con is going to change much for it.

The Cost

Fucking greedflation, man.

The last Blizzcon in 2019 had a ticket price hike for the base tickets and also added the Portal Pass, a premium ticket that allowed a lounge with drinks and panel viewing screens, a day 0 event allowing access to only the Darkmoon Faire area, and a dedicated, shorter security line just for Portal Pass. The cost of the base ticket was $229 and the portal pass was $550. For 2023, these two options are returning, but at $299 and $799. The benefits of both are less, as the goody bag on offer is just a backpack and the portal pass no longer has the night at the faire offering, but instead offers early access to the building (which only allows you into the lounge and doesn’t matter functionally for anything else, at least as we know at the moment).

So, uh…obviously, this is a lot of money. Everyone is still busy turning us average people over and shaking us to see what money falls out, and I absolutely expect that from Blizzard in 2023. It’s also less value than prior years – less swag, fewer actual con hours, and I can’t even be drunk during it without dipping out of the con area and running to a hotel bar! What a ripoff!

Okay, so without knowing what comes as a part of the experiential focus, this is obviously hard to actually judge, joking aside. I do dislike the price increase, especially because I think the value for money argument is valid here and not one Blizzard is doing that well on. At the same time, until we have a vision of what the “new” Blizzcon actually is, it isn’t something I can effectively say is good or bad in any sort of objective way. If I can go to booths and earn some sweet swag and fun prizes for just doing stuff (and not the vendor-traditional con scavenger hunt bullshit), then maybe that’s a cool deal and adds something to the show. Otherwise, it feels grubby and bad – Blizzard asks for more money than ever on boxed games and expansion content and now wants me to pony up more for Blizzcon on top of that? It’s a first-world problem to the extreme, but hey – we’re all here talking about video games.

So I will hold a full judgment for now but note that the price increase sucks, the value for money feels bad, and I genuinely have concerns over if Blizzard actually makes it feel okay or not. They managed it for Diablo IV, but that experience is a fair bit different.

The Elephant in the Room

Of course, all of this stuff only matters if you are going to Blizzcon, if you can look yourself in the mirror and see the journey through in terms of your moral compass and what it says about supporting this company at this moment in time, where they are very much on the backfoot in terms of image and perception and Blizzcon is at the center of at least some of that image damage.

And the thing is…I don’t know how to feel on that front yet.

When the news first broke in the summer of 2021, I said here that going to another Blizzcon felt like a hard decision I would think about eventually, partially because I had a lot of other game-related quandries on my plate but also because the possibility of another Blizzcon felt so distant in the haze of COVID. 2021 obviously never came to pass, and any potential of a 2022 was also snuffed out pretty quick in the wake of all the everything Blizzard had going on.

So now we’re here. And now I have to think about it, not as a logic puzzle or abstraction, but a real thing that is actually happening.

On the one hand, logically, I don’t think I would want to go. Blizzcon is at its most fun when it feels like home, when you can talk to strangers and have a good time meeting people who share the specific hyperfixations you have, when you can watch eSports like a real sport, beer in hand and yelling encouraged, and when you can meet the people behind your favorite games, the hobbies and entertainment that helped shape you and in some ways changed your life. I don’t think that Blizzard or Blizzcon feel like those places anymore, and I would struggle to unabashedly say I would go knowing what we all know now. Blizzard is a developer in identity crisis, helmed by clueless PR and corporate empty-heads and coasting on a reputation that increasingly feels distant and unearned, and I frankly don’t particularly care what Mike Ybarra wants to say on stage, given what he’ll say in the spotlight when dismissing the hard work of his employees. I don’t particularly want to cheer the Blizzard logo, to shout in approval at the remaining high-profile staff who likely knew much more about the culture there than they let on. I can’t cheer a new WoW expansion announcement because the last two times that happened at Blizzcon in-person, the expansion that popped out sucked pretty bad, and the most recent expansion I cheered in-person at Blizzcon led me to a yearlong exodus from the game which was, mostly, the game’s fault. I’m attending FFXIV Fan Fest for the first time this month at least in small part due to Shadowlands, which is…an achievement for Blizzard, maybe?

On the other hand, damn my default impulse is to want to go. My wife and I are going down to the area anyways, to see the new Nintendo World park at Universal Studios and to do Halloween Horror Nights together for the first time, but we picked our stay and full schedule around the idea of doing Blizzcon too. I have a lot of really good memories of Blizzcon and a lot of really good times spent there on those convention grounds, from the very first one in 2005 to the last in-person one prior to this year in 2019. I’ve driven down alone, with friends, with lots of friends, and I’ve even flown half-a-world over from Tokyo to arrive at LAX and go to Blizzcon. Attending Blizzcon is usually a banner part of my year, any year. 2018 was an awful con, but I went to Blizzard campus, I sat in with the WoW team for a day, I got to see the library and walk around and through the offices on a small private tour and I ate lunch on-site to just soak in the atmosphere. Even in 2010, probably the banner worst Blizzcon ever, I still had a great time.

I love going to the parties, meeting people, throwing down some beers and having some fun social experiences. I enjoy the quiet moments on the con floor, the night time buzz around the food trucks, going to the Disney Walgreens and buying an overpriced energy drink to tackle the day ahead of me. Even the mundanity of it feels like this fun time, where responsibilities and the real world melt away. I miss that feeling, and I think a lot of people do too. But those things are not exclusive to Blizzcon so much as many of them are just general vacation holiday feelings, and I’ve personally gotten to have them in much stronger forms in other places, like the ritual my wife and I built around our mornings in Tokyo, or waking up to take a train through the British and French countrysides. Blizzcon alone is not the sole arbiter or creator of such feelings, and we could have a fun trip just doing amusement parks, maybe going to a few afterparties, and then coming home. And right now, the cost Blizzard is asking for me to tackle alongside the trepidation of giving them that tacit support is a lot. Genuinely, I could only maybe afford tickets in the second batch, and even then, I’ve got to get over the hump of supporting Blizzard and returning to a place that has so many good memories for me but was haunted by the behavior of a small number of powerful people who made others have a much, much worse experience.

My friends are largely not interested, not wanting to spend the money, or both, and so it would just be me at the con, and in some ways that isn’t bad, but it also means no hype talks, no excited dinners at Coco’s to discuss the news and announcements. My wife doesn’t play any Blizzard stuff anymore and wouldn’t do the con, so while I would still have fun, there would be this built up layering of ritual and excitement just gone. Blizzard is contentious to say the least, and that carries a real cost in how willing people are to enjoy an experience they create.

In short…I still don’t really know how to feel about the idea of going to Blizzcon. I think as with any prior action against the game or developer, it is largely a personal decision for everyone to make against their own sense of morals and how they feel Blizzard is doing against those ideals. For me, it is tough. I am enjoying Dragonflight, at least the aspects of it I expected to, and a lot of the changes I made going into the expansion and my time away just playing FFXIV have given it new life. It has been four years since the last Blizzcon and so there is a feeling of desire to go again and see it through, to have the experiences I almost always enjoy. Diablo IV took me by surprise as a hit, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot too, with some caveats about how the seasonal model could change that. So to me, there is a big part of me that really wants to go to Blizzcon, to settle unambiguously on attending and to deal with the moral and fundamental arguments against it and decide in favor anyways.

But there is another part that thinks that Blizzard hasn’t really earned that trust. Dragonflight has been good but it has also had issues and reflected some desire to retain old, bad habits. Blizzard as a company has continued to agitate negatively against unionization of its employees and has put their foot down strongly on employees in general, driving out talent through rigid return-to-office protocols, dismissal of employee value coming straight from the top of the Blizzard hierarchy, and an obvious desire to continue to chart their prior course uninhibited by that pesky image management. Blizzcon 2023 is asking us to collectively forget that or cast it aside in order to give them more money for less show on only the vague promise that the show will be better and a more focused experience designed to be fun for attendees, but with little put forward to establish good faith in those ideas.

So it’s dicey, and I think that while I expect Blizzard will still sell out of tickets and the whole thing will go well on that level, I genuinely wonder what the experience they’re planning looks like and question how it will be received.