User blog comment:Fandyllic/Diablo III unlikely to ship for 2011 holiday season/@comment-81.225.233.93-20110722104745

Remind yourself of the wow expansions, such as for example wrath of the lich king. They had a delivery date, despite beta testing being far from over. They shipped and it was in stores on their release date. The version of the software in stores however, was not the latest build from the beta realms, first thing happening after installation is another patch do get your software up to date. The same was true with Lord of Destruction (if my memory serves me well), but you could actually play the preboxed version in single player. Bnet forced an update though.