Blizzard is Skipping Gamescom 2019

Source: www.mmogames.com --- Wednesday, May 01, 2019
It is time once again to add to the list of “WTF is Blizzard thinking?” list that we’ve been collecting this year. This time it’s the news that Blizzard is skipping GamesCom 2019. Now, there might be a lot of people, especially those in North America who aren’t familiar with GamesCom and why Blizzard’s absence is so noteworthy. GamesCom has 370,000 visitors with 1037 exhibitors making it by far the largest gaming event in the world. In comparison, E3, which is often thought to be the biggest and most important had just 69,000 attendees in 2018. GamesCom has, in the past, been a very important location for Blizzard themselves. It is where they’ve debuted some of Overwatch’s most beloved animated shorts and World of Warcraft expansions. They’ve also often giving players the first chance to play new content for games before they’re released. However, with nothing big and new to show off this year it clearly isn’t worth the cost for Blizzard to attend. We can only imagine how much it costs for Blizzard to go to GamesCom. In the public area, they take up nearly if not actually half an entire hall. In the business area, the Activision-Blizzard area is half of one floor of a hall. They send a huge team of developers from California and let me tell you, the cost of hotels in Cologne during GamesCom is insane. So, on the surface, it may seem totally insane for Blizzard not to be attending…it actually makes a lot of sense. Plus, GamesCom ...

from GamesCom http://bit.ly/2GW9gC5