Today Blizzard Entertainment announced it won't have a booth on the show floor at Germany's massive Gamescom event this summer "as part of a renewed effort this year to maintain our focus on development."

This is significant given how large Gamescom has become; last year the multi-day video game trade fair, which takes place in Cologne and is open to the public, saw well over 300,000 attendees. 

It's a good place to get the word out about your games, but that doesn't seem to be the company's priority right now; after pulling resources and staff off Heroes of the Storm and laying off hundreds of Blizzard staff earlier this year (part of a larger wave of layoffs executed in the wake of record-breaking earnings), Activision Blizzard has made a show of talking up its plans to re-invest in game development.

"The number of developers working on Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Overwatch, Warcraft, Hearthstone and Diablo in aggregate will increase approximately 20% over the course of 2019," the company stated in its March earnings release. "The company will fund this greater investment by de-prioritizing initiatives that are not meeting expectations and reducing certain non-development and administrative-related costs across the business."

While Blizzard won't have a booth at Gamescom in August, the company says it hopes to return in the future and looks forward to "sharing more details about the projects we’re currently working on when the time is right."