1434 Patton Place | Carrollton, Texas | 214.343.2000 | f214.343.3461 | www.tradegroup.com © The Trade Group®

THE TRADE GROUP®

Case Study BlizzCon World of Warcraft Diorama

Blizzard Entertainment’s Massive Activation Wows Fans and Makes the Guinness Book of World Records at BlizzCon 2017

Overview: BlizzCon is an epic celebration of Blizzard Entertainment’s games, esports

and the communities that bring them to life. The diorama featured Blizzard’s new game:

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth.

Location: Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California

Attendance: More than 35,000 people attended BlizzCon 2017, up from 27,000+ the previous year.

Fun Fact: Blizzard also hosted gaming competitions at its new Blizzard Arena Los Angeles, located in Burbank, California.

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is the video game developer behind popular game franchises Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch. With its annual event BlizzCon, Blizzard gives fans the opportunity to participate in esports tournaments and celebrate their favorite games with likeminded friends in the gaming community.

In 2017, Blizzard wanted to do something super special to thank its fans, while raising awareness for the newest addition to the World of Warcraft franchise, Battle for Azeroth. So, Blizzard’s ad agency, Liquid Advertising, came up with the idea to create the largest video game diorama in the world. Blizzard loved the idea and asked The Trade Group to help facilitate the project.

1434 Patton Place | Carrollton, Texas | 214.343.2000 | f214.343.3461 | www.tradegroup.com © The Trade Group®

According to Neeshu Hajra, VP of Business Development at The Trade Group, “Over the years, we’ve worked with Blizzard on numerous activations, including esports initiatives, trade show exhibitry, fan appreciation, consumer marketing and building their stands for shows like PAX. We were working on several projects for BlizzCon already, including building a stage for their new esports arena and launching the new Darkmoon Faire, when the diorama project was presented to us.”

The Concept: 10K+ unique 3-D figurines placed in a 1,300+ sq. ft. diorama.

Blizzard randomly selected over 10,000+ BlizzCon attendee’s World of Warcraft characters to be 3-D printed and placed in the diorama. Each figurine would be unique, representing the armor set, race and class of the attendees’ actual in-game character.

The goal of the actual scene was to recreate the Battle for Lordaeron between the game’s two factions, the Alliance and the Horde, which was depicted in the new World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth launch video.

1434 Patton Place | Carrollton, Texas | 214.343.2000 | f214.343.3461 | www.tradegroup.com © The Trade Group®

3-D Printing. Liquid Advertising was able to sample the game and assemble a list of the unique characters of 10K+ fans attending the event. Blizzard provided TTG with a spreadsheet of the characters and their unique attributes (armor set, race and class). From there, the graphic design team used software to create digital representations of the characters, which the 3-D printer then produced. Characters were then painted red (Horde) or blue (Alliance).

Quality Control. Printing thousands of 3-D pieces and ensuring each player’s unique character comes out perfect had its challenges. “During the process, we needed to reprint some characters that were damaged in shipping or had small, subtle errors due to the printing process. We also found cross-references on the spreadsheet that were mismatched. The Trade Group provided the entire QC mechanic interface with the 3-D printer to let them know which lines of the spreadsheet needed to be fixed. From there we fixed the issues and layered on 3-D. Ultimately, we provided quality control for all 10,000+ figurines,” Hajra says.

What Blizzard asked TTG to do and how we did it.

Blizzard initially asked TTG to fabricate the diorama and recreate the scene, but the scope of the project continued to escalate right up to launch date, due to the thousands of miniscule details associated with the production and placement of the tiny 2.5” tall figurines. The following snapshot describes how the project came together:

1434 Patton Place | Carrollton, Texas | 214.343.2000 | f214.343.3461 | www.tradegroup.com © The Trade Group®

Art Direction and Signature Pieces. Under Blizzard’s watchful and guiding eye, the team art directed the placement of each of the 10,000 figurines on the battlefield, even creating battle lines for the Alliance. The scene also included special statues of King Anduin Wrynn (leader of the Alliance) and Sylvanas (leader of the Hoards), which were specially 3-D printed and hand painted, as well as several large Alliance siege engines, placed strategically throughout the scene.

Find Your Character – Web Interface and App. What good is having your very own unique 3-D character hanging out in a massive diorama, if you don’t know where to find it? Says Hajra, “To go the extra yard for fans, Blizzard wanted to give attendees the ability to find their character in the diorama. So we created a web page (also accessible through the event app) where fans could look up their character via their battle tag and find which grid in the diorama the character was located.”

TTG also took panoramic shots of each grid cluster, so people who were unable to visit the diorama or didn’t have time to find their character could find it online. Fans could log onto the web page where they could grab a post-able video that showed exactly where their character was located.

1434 Patton Place | Carrollton, Texas | 214.343.2000 | f214.343.3461 | www.tradegroup.com © The Trade Group®

Fan appreciation for the diorama was overflowing on social media and in online reports. They truly loved this one-of-a-kind, personalized experience. The Guinness Book of World Records also made it to BlizzCon, where they recognized the diorama as “The Largest Video Game Diorama in the World.” Finally, the diorama was recognized as the winner of the Promax Games “Thinking Outside of the Box” Award for 2018. Congratulations Blizzard!

From Fan Love to Guinness Book to Promax Game AwardsThe Battle for Lordaeron Diorama Wins BIG!

Photo Credit: pcgamer.com Photo Credit: twitter.com/promaxbda

Want to break records and amaze fans at an upcoming event, esports activation or trade show?

Our trade show, esports and live event specialists are here to help. To learn more about 3-D printing, esports event services, exhibit design and how to produce a memorable live event or experience, give us a call at 800-343-2005.