From an end-of-year post from Blizzard Entertainment‘s President, Mike Ybarra, the over three-year absent fan event BlizzCon got confirmed to return in 2023.
The BlizzCon confirmation was a short snippet of a much larger body of text. While announcing several significant players in Blizzard’s operating teams, Ybarra revealed April McKee got hired to be the Executive Producer of BlizzCon. His tiny note afterward reads: “Yes, we’re bringing BlizzCon back – more on that early next year!”
Ybarra had previously announced in an interview he was determined to relaunch BlizzCon in 2023, so this isn’t too much of a surprise. However, it is a rather big deal when knowing that the last in-person event was back in 2019.
Elsewhere in the post discusses “about 12 billion hours of Blizzard games were played this year,” with “50 million new players” joining the Blizzard umbrella. From World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, Overwatch 2, Wrath of Lich King Classic, Hearthstone, Diablo Immortal, and others introducing new content, Blizzard was able to build massive player engagement.
As they continue pumping out releases/additions in 2023, there are many improvements internally on the horizon. Through key full-time staff brought onto various teams at Blizzard, Ybarra ensured the company’s commitment to rebuilding its culture by enlisting members with different insights, experiences, backgrounds, functions, and identities.
During 2022, they’ve taken “a deep look at the mission, vision, and values upon which Blizzard was built” through “one of the other major projects this year.” Staff talked about how those values are “interpreted and lived,” and looking ahead, wondered “how they could be improved or modernized.”
Ybarra writes, “everyone at Blizzard had the chance to have their voice heard in this critical work,” which employees and players will “see the results of in the new year.”
You can read the entire post on the Blizzard website.
