Almost 15 years since the series’ last totally new game, some form of StarCraft revival could apparently be in the pipeline as it’s reported that four companies are in competition to secure the rights to work on new games in the series.
A machine-translated report from AsiaToday (which has also been shared and partially translated by South Korean news account @KoreaXboxNews on Twitter) claims that Nexon, Krafton, Netmarble, and NCSoft are all competing to try and secure global publishing rights for StarCraft, with some apparently having travelled to visit Blizzard in person with their pitches.
Furthermore, it’s reported that each company is suggesting different things for the series, with Netmarble apparently proposing the idea of bringing the franchise to mobile platforms in some way, Krafton reportedly wanting to develop a new game, and Nexon putting forward some sort of unique idea to use the IP. The report also appears to suggest that NCSoft could develop an RPG of some sort.
It should go without saying, but this should definitely be taken with a pinch of salt while it remains unconfirmed. Just last year, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier claimed that at the time of him writing his book about Blizzard (titled Play Nice), a new StarCraft shooter was in development at the company. Hype levels grew when, not long after this comment, a job advert confirmed that Blizzard was working on an unannounced “upcoming open-world shooter game.”
StarCraft fans have been burned before, however – just think of StarCraft: Ghost, which was announced all the way back in 2002 before it sadly lived up to its name, got indefinitely postponed in 2006, and then later canceled altogether. Hopefully, whatever is reportedly going on behind the scenes at Blizzard today ultimately leads to something new – even the series’ latest release, the remaster of the first game, will be eight years old this August.
StarCraft 2 veteran would want a sequel to go open world, or just “try something radically new.”
