BlizzCon 2010: Las Vegas?!

In fairly surprising news, it seems that next year’s Blizzcon will be held in the Las Vegas Convention Center on July 30-31st, 2010. There is not a word about next year’s Blizzcon yet on the official site, but the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority website has the booking listed, which seems a fairly official confirmation.

BlizzCon 2010
Venue: Las Vegas Convention Center
Start Date: 07/30/2010
End Date: 07/31/2010
Attendees: 30,000
URL: www.blizzcon.com

Vegas is a somewhat more central location than Anaheim (except for all the Blizzard employees who lived 5 miles away), and there’s certainly more to do in town. On the other hand, the 30,000 attendee capacity isn’t much bigger than they managed this year in the smaller Anaheim Convention Center, and there’s one other drawback: temperatures in Las Vegas in late July = the surface of the sun.

Blizzcons keep getting earlier… the convention was in October in 2008, and in mid-August this year. Also note that the July date for 2010 seems to rule out any WWI type events between now and then, since Blizzard likes to hold those major shows at least six months apart.

Update: Blizzard has released one of their usual carefully-parsed announcements that neither denies nor confirms anything:

Thanks to our colleague MD for this quote. He’s taking it as a debunking of Vegas. I take it as Blizzard’s usual, “We’ve not officially confirmed X, so no one else should talk about X yet.” You’ll have to make up your own mind how you wish to interpret their words vs. the convention listing on the Las Vegas CC website.

Update #2: Blizzard has now released an official denial.

Left unanswered is how the listing came to appear on the LVCC in the first place. That link is now dead, and Blizzcon is no longer listed amongst the events scheduled for late July in Vegas.