They will keep patching SC2 but thats basically it ,and they would be focusing on the “future”
They made a post about that a couple of years ago i think.
An actor(can’t remember his name) posted “keep starcraft alive” on twitter ,a dev posted an answer: (posting only a smiley says allot imo)
Then there is Blizzcon 2023 ,we already have d4 ,overwatch2 ,dragonflight next to WoTLK the best expansion yet imo.
So i predict an announcement at blizzcon 2023 ,a completely new game or SC3.
It’s the only franchise that hasn’t gotten any love recently.
SC2 is such a solid game to this day but i have faith in blizzard
you think blzizard in this industries current state, is going to announce sc3 at blizzcon? people are getting laid off and you think they are gonna announce a big aaa rts?
Simu Liu was the actor who posted about StarCraft II(as well as making a big reference to it on a Saturday Night Live he hosted). The guy who responded with a smiley was Mike Ybarra, president of Blizzard Entertainment who also randomly posted a picture of a Legacy of the Void t-shirt. Since then nothing has happened beyond some minor patches to StarCraft II and StarCraft Remastered with the changes being decided on outside of Blizzard.
Both on the Blizzard and Activision side of things, the focus has been narrowed down to Overwatch, Warcraft, Diablo, and Call of Duty with the strategy being providing “multiple points of entry” to those properties through different platforms and business models. There’s also a survival game in development that takes place in a new IP.
Virtually all the lead developers who worked on the StarCraft franchise have left Blizzard at this point. Samwise Didier, Valerie Chu, and Bob Fitch are some of the few big names that are still around.(I suppose you could also include Christie Golden since she wrote five of the StarCraft novels.) Out of those, all except Fitch were involved on the art or writing side, not gameplay.
I guess one very small bit of light comes from the fact that Warcraft III Reforged has been getting some legitimate work done on it to provide the game features that were dropped after the original. They’ve even said that they’re considering a soft relaunch of the game. But that took it being moved under the Warcraft team just like Diablo II and III were moved under the main Diablo team. Both StarCraft games are under Classic Games along with Heroes of the Storm which likewise is only receiving basic maintenance now.
I very seriously doubt there will be a new StarCraft title announced at this year’s BlizzCon. I’ll be surprised if either game even gets any cosmetics bundled with the BlizzCon Virtual Ticket. At some point, the franchise will be revisited, possibly in a different game genre but it won’t be anytime soon even if Microsoft is successful in its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
No kidding. You’d think people might put a thinking-cap on on occasion.
That’s a good thing. They didn’t know what they were doing, they just created something novel. SC1 has the same fundamental problems that SC2 has, just 10x worse. SC1 is a mechanics game, zero strategy involved, and the defensive styles are drastically overpowered compared to aggressive and greedy ones (meaning the game has a tendency to stalemate). Because the game goes long, it becomes a mechanics game which is amplified by the lack of basic UI features, such as the ability to select more than 12 units. It’s not a good game. That’s why basically nobody plays it.
Usually the place to look for novel game ideas would be the indie developer sector, but they don’t have the technical experience to implement complex game engines. SC2’s engine is a technical masterpiece. The people who coded that thing are literal geniuses. Some shoebox startup can’t afford those programming services, and programmers with those skills won’t be working at a low paying indie studio. Indie studios are usually young adult programmers who are in the process of going through college, or something like that, which is why the games tend to be extremely simple. Minecraft, Angry Birds, etc, are like 1st grade mathematics compared to the insane complexity of SC2’s game engine which is closer to AP calculus. The rumor on the street is that once the career engineers at Microsoft took over Minecraft, they were perpetually face-palming at the quality of the code.
In other words, if Blizzard doesn’t bankroll it, nobody will do it. What you see is what you get.
Let’s put it this way: If a group of developers who were never on the dev teams for either StarCraft title were going to make a game that had all of the responsiveness and technical quality of StarCraft while also putting a new layer of strategy on top of it we’d probably have seen it happen by now.
However, there are multiple studios founded by people who were previously involved with StarCraft that are now working on new RTS properties. We’ll see how they do.
At Blizzcon 2018 I attended a Starcraft roundtable. Among the topics, the future of SC was presented in a single sentence: there was no intention to make Starcraft 3.
Granted, if SC2 was still being actively developed, one could say that 5 years is plenty of time to change their mind.
However, considering that 1) SC2 development has officially ended and SCR is assumed ended, 2) most of the big SC personnel left the company/were reassigned to other franchises (in other words, dev Team 1 was eliminated), and 3) the fact that they didn’t have any intention of making a SC3, it unfortunately is a virtual impossibility that there will be a SC3 announcement, at any point.
If SC2 is resurrected and/or SC3 is developed, my money would be on the new ownership making it happen. Who knows what Microsoft has planned for Activision. Usually when a company buys out another company, they have to turn the thumbscrews to make a big profit off their investment. That’s why it’s common to do layoffs right after an acquisition – they cut off the excess fat to make the machine more lean. It’s not clear whether that reasoning applies to Microsoft because they almost certainly didn’t pay for it with credit so they don’t have steep payments to make, but it would be silly to invest that kind of money into something and then not utilize it.
I’d estimate SC2 has very little value unless it were actively developed. It’s not like they are selling lots of new copies and there isn’t a subscription fee for the multiplayer service. I think most people would be fine paying a subscription fee if it meant the game was actively developed, e.g. new maps every season, big design reworks every year to keep things fresh, etc. There’s about 170k people so at $5 bucks a month that would be in ballpark of 10 million/year. That’s more than enough to pay a team to actively develop new content for the game, maybe even to sponsor esports.
I’d think that would be fine if the game started as sub based. However, adding it somewhere along the way would cause some serious backlash. I know I’d be pissed if a single-purchase game I had been playing for years suddenly required a subscription to keep playing.
That would work if it was SC2 by itself in a vacuum. But, it’s part of a larger conglomerate who will decide asset allocation based off the whole company, not just a single game.
As a simplified example, I do a cost-benefit analysis on 1) putting 100 people on SC2 and it produces X profit. Then on 2) putting the same 100 people on OW2 and make 50X profit. Despite SC2 profiting right out, those 100 people are going to OW2.
My guess is that they would use the same cost-benefit analysis that Bliz used when they decided to end SC2’s development. Unless something significant changes, I suspect MS would arrive at the same results.
We’re talking $5/month for a service that provides hours of entertainment. No adult is even going to blink at that. There is nothing else on the planet that you can do to entertain yourself for that cost. The SC2 playerbase is probably 20-30 years old on average. It’s a dedicated, loyal fan base that could afford to pay for the services that they use.
There will probably be a minority of complainers, 1-5% perhaps, but that’s a small price to pay for revitalizing the game. It’s not like they can’t play the single player, which is what they paid for when they bought the game. The multiplayer service is an extension of the game that Blizzard provides entirely for free.
If SC2 were subsidized and not a net-profit that would make sense. But if it brings in a substantial net profit then it can fund itself, which is why subscriptions would be a good option.
With $5/month, you could probably only put about 10 people max. But, to crank out new maps, balance updates, design “refreshes”, esports sponsorships, that’s all you’d need.
We’re talking 1-2 business manager, 2-3 programmers, 2-3 artists, 2-3 game designers. That puts about 10-20% of the game’s monthly revenue to pay for the labor, you could probably take another 10-20% for esports sponsorships which would be a healthy 1-2 million/year, and that leaves 6 or so million/year in profit.
My question is how much the sale of Activision factored into their decision making. For example, they were planning on doing yearly redesigns until those were paused around the time the Activision sale was going down. I think it’s likely that they paused development as a result of the sale.
Despite my doom and goom above, I’m totally down for more SC. It’s good to know that someone there would like to pick it back up again. Hopefully they do.
I would! I tolerate a subscription for MMOs because they A: provide a service via maintaining the servers that the game fundamentally cannot operate without and B: they provide regular content. I would never pay a subscription for anything else. I buy a game once and then I own it, and actively resent anything else.
Microsoft is buying Acti-Blizz to release CoD and other games in the Game Pass. CoD alone will bring so many players to their service, that any revenue sc2 can generate is absolutely nothing. I am pretty sure that Microsoft will not be interested in starcraft as well as warcraft, because both of them can’t be released on Xbox, even if the creators of sc and wc were still in Blizzard, which is not the case. Without these guys in the company, there is no future for RTS.
yeah dude im not pay 5 for a sub to play a game, and ill tell you right now straight up, you really need to stop smoking that craeckpype you got. Seriously dude its messing your head up.
no way in hell would i ever pay 5 to play a game i already paid for years ago. I also wont buy no dlc bs or any other crap the game or game designers throw out after i already purchaced the game. For example, I still have yet to buy any commanders as well as the nova. I also dont play alot of games out there other than sc2 just for this fact alone. If you buy a game, then that should be it, Its already been paid for, and should not EVER be payed for over and over again. Frankly all these new games companies out there that require you to purchase purchase purchase, all the new game content have totally ruined all video game experiences for me. This is why i stick to classic retro gaming, no stupid dlcs no extra money to play, no online service to pay for, no extra cost bullst. No f all that bs. Game companies have gotten way to greedy and on top of that most games nowadays are pay to play, pay to win. Ive got so many better things to throw my money at than to pay for extra content on something i already bought.
on a side note of this, video game companies are like drug dealers. They know damn well that there a people out there that need there next fix. I would pay anyone to do a skit of old gamers versus new gamers and have the new gamers go up to the game “dealer” looking for that next fix. that would be one of the best skits out there. Hell can we get dave chappell to do this. Please. Some one get ahold of dave.
Here’s a little lesson on business for you. Customers are people willing to buy your products and services. If they aren’t willing to do that, they aren’t your customers. Businesses do not try to cater to people who aren’t their customers (especially hostile ones). Customers come first forever and always. To suggest otherwise would be a ludicrous inversion of reality. If you aren’t a customer, you are irrelevant. People who like something have no problem in helping support it financially.
All a corporation is is a big group of people with similar interests banding together to make something they want. Customers are a critical part of that union because they provide the funding to make it happen. Where do you think money comes from, money trees perhaps? As a customer you pick and choose what enterprises you support, and you help to provide the funding that makes the enterprise possible. If you don’t support an enterprise, then why would the enterprise support you? Do you think these things exist for the purpose of giving you free stuff? Lmao. If there is no funding, there is no enterprise. If you like SC2 and you want more SC2, you should be willing to support it financially by purchasing stuff that helps support their enterprise. It’s not rocket science.
Saying “I am not going to buy X product/service” is equivalent to saying that product or service is worthless to you. If that product/service is worthless to you, then you should have no problem if it costs money because you weren’t going to buy it anyway.
(posting only a smiley says allot imo)