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Jason Schreier’s upcoming book, Play Nice, is an expose of Blizzard’s corporate history. Within, the investigative reporter reveals that one of its dormant franchises, Starcraft, still has a shooter in the works.
“Starcraft isn’t dead” Schreier assured fans waiting 14 years since the last mainline series entry in an interview with IGN. This was in response to the interviewer bringing up a small excerpt from the end of the book which, paraphrased, says that Dan Hay was brought in to Blizzard to start a new team. Unfortunately, most of the team were laid off, though a handful stayed on to “begin incubating, of all things, a Starcraft shooter.”
“Perhaps after Starcraft: Ghost and Ares, another cancelled project, the third time would be the charm,” the book suggests. Speaking with IGN, Schreier then joked that that only depends on if it’s not cancelled.
In 2006, Blizzard cancelled Starcraft: Ghost, its first attempt at creating a shooter within the franchise. Mike Morhaime, founder of Blizzard, said that this was a result of new generational hardware inbound, which saw the game being indefinitely delayed. Unfortunately, it was never picked back up again.
Project Ares was another Starcraft shooter cancelled in 2019. According to Kotaku, this was a result of a focus on Overwatch and Diablo 4 – two titles which have returned spectacularly for Blizzard.
Last year, Schreier spoke to former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, who laid the foundational rumours for Starcraft’s switch over to the shooter genre. “Ybarra hinted that the next iteration could be in a different genre altogether,” the Bloomberg reporter wrote. This seems to be a result of the lack of commercial interest in RTS games, or at least, interests that don’t necessarily translate to the billion dollar revenue that Blizzard anticipates from its GaaS future.
Only yesterday, Phil Spencer revealed that the Starcraft games would finally land on Game Pass. Starcraft II is a near timeless game, so launching onto the service is going to help keep those titles alive, and if a shooter is in the works, it’s only going to seek to reawaken the franchise.
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