Blizzard Entertainment has officially announced the replacement for its annual convention BlizzCon. Dubbed BlizzConline, the event will be an online-only one and will take place next year from February 19-20. The company alluded to this earlier this year when they were forced to cancel their in-person convention due to the worldwide effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic, but didn’t have any real concrete information for it at the time. It isn’t clear if Blizzard is still going to hold their usual November convention in 2021, but for now, this online event is what we’re getting. The company hasn’t mentioned if the event will cost any money or be completely free for everyone to watch.

📢 BlizzConline is set to take place February 19-20, 2021!

There’s lots of planning left to do, but we wanted to provide an early heads-up on how you can take part in the online festivities! 🎉

Check out the blog for more details on the fun! 👀

🔍 https://t.co/fY1x6SBMZm pic.twitter.com/QNev7OiGFX

— Blizzard Entertainment (@Blizzard_Ent) September 21, 2020

Blizzard has stated that all of the familiar community showcases will be featured here. This includes the Cosplay Exhibition, Cosplay Contest, Art Contest, Digital Storytelling Contest, Talent Spotlight, and the famous March of the Murlocs. Since this will be an online-only event, everything will have to be done remotely, and those participating in these competitions will be prepping everything to be shown virtually. For example, in the March of the Murlocs, fans would normally dress up as the titular Murloc’s and go marching throughout the convention. In this case, fans will now instead send videos to the company of them marching by themselves, or with family and friends.

While the community events are always fun to participate in, the real crux of any BlizzCon is always the game announcements. While Blizzard makes no mention of any potential IP’s being talked about in this initial announcement of the event, they do state that “We still have a lot of planning to do, and it’ll be some time before we’re ready to share more details.” It’s definitely a huge possibility that the company is saving most, if not all of their reveals for this online-event. However, as we mentioned earlier, if there’s a chance that they will still hold an in-person convention by November of next year, then there’s a small chance that the BlizzConline event is going to be just a community-based one.

BlizzConline will take place from February 19-20. Until then, we still have our amazing talk with Jeff Kaplan from the previous year.