This past Friday, a shopper at a Best Buy in Rochester, MN noticed this large sign proudly proclaiming that Blizzard’s long awaited Diablo III would be launching on February 1 of this year. Complete with digital countdown clock, the sign promised a midnight opening to go along with the release. While it’s easy to get hopeful with the the purported release so tantalizingly close, this is probably just a case of retailers making up plausible sounding dates for a release. A big clue is that they spelled “February” as “Feburary” on the sign.
In addition to the signage, the Best Buy website currently lists Diablo III as having a February 1 release date. Interestingly, the G4 website also lists February 1 as the release date, while the U.K. site GamePlay has the release set for February 3. While that is intriguing, the Minnesota sign apparently didn’t last very long. According to Joystiq, the sign has been taken down as of this morning. They quote a Best Buy associate as saying this was done at the behest of the general manager because the release date was, “not very firm.” Furthermore, the associate also confirmed that the signage was made in-house and was not delivered by Blizzard.
Blizzard, which is famously shy about release dates and prefers to announce games “when they’re done,” has remained mum on the subject. Their lack of comment probably has more to do with it being the weekend than anything else. The last official word on a release date for Diablo III was that the game was expected in the first quarter of 2012. However, Blizzard community manager Bashiok (Micah Whiple) posted this to his Twitter account regarding the Best Buy date:
We can’t really keep every individual retail shop from making up a date.
He followed with:
Retailers will not know a date until its officially announced through a press release.
This last statement is particularly damning, as it seems to say, “they’ll know when you know.” It’s also worth noting that Blizzard is currently running a sweepstakes which rewards entrants with key codes to the Diablo III beta. It seems unlikely that they would still be running an active beta test with less than 30 days before release.
As is always the case with Blizzard, we’ll probably just have to wait for the official word.
(image via sasquatchxing, via Joystiq)
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