After several years spent supporting Overwatch and World of Warcraft, making remasters, joining Xbox, and launching Diablo 4, it seems like Blizzard may have a surprising new game on the way. This news comes from an IGN interview with Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier about his upcoming book on Blizzard, Play Nice, and concerns ex-Far Cry lead Dan Hay working on a new shooter set in the StarCraft universe. Hay joined Blizzard in 2022, and while Bloomberg previously reported him as overseeing a survival project codenamed Odyssey, its cancelation in January 2024 has allegedly transferred him to this StarCraft project instead.
It’s been a while since Blizzard has done anything high-profile with the StarCraft IP since StarCraft 2 lost its competitive scene to its predecessor, but now feels like the time to try again. The last new StarCraft releases were StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft 2: Campaign Collection in 2017, and while both are arriving on PC Game Pass in November 2024, the series hasn’t seen much action otherwise. A new StarCraft game would give one of Blizzard’s all-time great franchises a much-needed shot in the arm, but producing a shooter spin-off instead of a true StarCraft 3 could be a fatal mistake.
A StarCraft Shooter Sounds Like The Wrong Move
The main issue here can be boiled down to a single statement, which is that StarCraft fans want StarCraft 3. Despite the fan base having aged significantly and the real-time strategy genre having mostly fallen out of favor alongside StarCraft 2, there is still an enduring passion for the franchise and its gameplay. StarCraft 1 and its Brood War expansion would not have joined Super Smash Bros. Melee and Halo 3 as their communities’ preferred competitive titles without endearing themselves to their players, and the StarCraft community would no doubt receive at least StarCraft 3‘s announcement with open arms.
Blizzard Can’t Afford To Split Its FPS Efforts
However, that’s not what fans are looking at. If the rumored StarCraft project is able to get off the ground, it will be a shooter, and most likely a competitive first-person hero-centric one, based on Blizzard’s expertise. That expertise comes from Overwatch and Overwatch 2, one continuous game that has been embroiled in constant controversies since the name switch. Marvel Rivals is already lined up to compete with Overwatch, and early impressions claim it has a real shot at doing so. Throwing another Blizzard game into this increasingly crowded market could fail to make a splash, and that’s not the only obstacle in a StarCraft shooter’s way.
StarCraft Shooters Are Already Saddled With Red Flags
Not only is the shooter market overflowing, while the RTS well has nearly run dry, Blizzard’s own StarCraft supply has been suspect for years. This new project is actually the third rumored StarCraft shooter, and the prior two met the same fate. Many rumored Blizzard projects have been canceled across its history, like the 2019 shooter Ares that was said to be in the StarCraft universe, but StarCraft: Ghost actually got a 2002 announcement before slowly transitioning from delayed in 2006 to officially canceled in 2014. Ghost’s protagonist Nova made it to StarCraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm, but the loss of a promising StarCraft FPS still lingers in older fans’ minds.
The Risk Of A StarCraft FPS Outweighs The Reward
If this new StarCraft game can fight past Blizzard’s cancelation track record, ongoing talent bleed, and hero shooter redundancies, followed up by penetrating a potentially full hero shooter market where Concord just failed, then maybe it has a chance. That’s a monumental long shot, and if the project is still in its infancy, pivoting to a better genre for StarCraft is the better choice. As hard of a sell as an RTS is these days, returning StarCraft to its home genre is still a safer bet than turning it into a shooter.
