Why the Diablo III Release Date Will be Announced on March 12th

The Blizzard sleuths over at BlizzPlanet are so convinced that Diablo III’s release date will be announced on Monday, March 12th, that they’ve cranked out an editorial sporting all of the evidence they can muster to support that assertion. There are a couple of compelling arguments in here, but I’m not sure I’d put any money on it just yet:

So at this point we’ve established that the game is likely to be announced by press release on a Monday. So why March 12?

We know that Diablo 3 is finishing up. A good (sign of release) is all of the beta key giveaways we’ve been seeing these past couple weeks. It started with Blizzard giving away 100,000 to North America via opt-in on battle.net, went to several fansites giving away 450 keys per site, and now we’re seeing lots of other large gaming sites giving away thousands of keys and even more keys being given away in Europe through the opt-in system as well as keys being given away at CeBIT. Some of this probably has to do with stress testing but also in the last 5 years beta in the gaming community has been used as a great way to hype your upcoming product.

We also know that Lead Designer Jay Wilson has been chomping at the bit about this game getting really close to being done. Recently he made the comment:

(We think you’re going to love Diablo III when it’s released, and speaking of release plans, you can seriously expect a launch-date announcement from us in the near future. See, I didn’t say (soon,) so I’m not taunting you. 😉 You’ll know as soon as I know for sure the exact date.)

Also on twitter when he was asked by user @ChrisFW on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being imminent) how close we were to hearing that all important D3 announcement Jay Wilson responded with a 9. These 2 tidbits of information tells me we’re going to hear something within the next couple weeks. Which leads me to why I think it will be next week.

The other reason I believe March 12 is the big date is because next week is the WoW: Mists of Pandaria Press Event. The NDA for that event lifts on Monday March 19. The news coming out of the MoP press event will be huge as we’ll be learning all kinds of new things about WoW’s latest expansion. It will be all over the news that week and people will be swooning over the new information presented by the various news sites.