Nine years ago, StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void was released, which is the last full-fledged new real-time strategy game from Blizzard. However, there haven’t been any internal pitches for fresh RTS spin-offs.
How do we know this? Bloomberg journalist and industry insider Jason Schreier has spoken to over 350 people from the Activision-Blizzard environment for his new book “Play Nice – The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment” and shared some of the insights in a recent “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit recently.
At one point, a player asked if Schreier had found any hints about the development of Warcraft 4 while researching the book – was the game perhaps once planned, only to be later canceled?
Ah, Warcraft 3 plus The Frozen Throne remains one of the best games of all time:
RTS fans at Blizzard despair
What did Jason Schreier respond? Jason Schreier explains in his response that while Starcraft II has done quite well, the trilogy ultimately fell short of the company’s high expectations. Each installment is said to have sold worse than the previous one.
However, Blizzard still had a team led by Tim Morten that wanted to stay true to the real-time strategy genre. They created all kinds of pitches and prototypes, including for Warcraft 4 and even for an RTS with the Call of Duty license. The latter is said to show how desperate Morten had become in the meantime, according to Schreier.
Ultimately, however, all concepts failed due to the leadership, which reportedly saw no need for a new real-time strategy game. On the contrary, the disastrous launch of Warcraft 3: Reforged is said to have finally closed the door on new RTS projects.
The result of this development: Tim Morten and other RTS experts left Blizzard to work as part of Frost Giant Studios on the new real-time strategy game Stormgate, which had a rather disappointing early access launch in July 2024.
What is going on with Blizzard and the RTS genre? Between 1994 and 1998, the California studio established three brands that not only initiated Blizzard’s meteoric rise but also continue to hold great sway today: Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo.
Two of these three brands were closely tied to the real-time strategy genre for a long time. The Warcraft trilogy and Starcraft are considered genre-defining milestones, with games like Warcraft 3 still appearing on lists of the best games of all time. It is therefore no surprise that many fans have been hoping for a Warcraft 4 or StarCraft 3 for years.
Why is there no new RTS from Blizzard? Especially World of Warcraft, but later also Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm, have shown Blizzard that much more money can be made with service games than with real-time strategy games, which, although they have multiplayer, are often only played once by many players.
Furthermore, due to the enormous success of WoW, Blizzard grew so rapidly in a very short time that the monthly costs skyrocketed. The long development times, even for comparatively small games, along with canceled projects like Titan intensified the pressure to think and develop more cost-effectively.
Will there ever be a new RTS from Blizzard? Jason Schreier is unsure: “Maybe there is space under Xbox for a small team to work on an RTS and release it through Game Pass or something, but who knows these days?”
Currently, there are indeed rumors and indications that Blizzard is working on a new game for the StarCraft license, but Jason Schreier claims to have heard that it is a shooter (as our sister magazine GameStar reports).
What do you think? Would you like a Warcraft 4 or StarCraft 3? Let us know in the comments. By the way, Jason Schreier had many other juicy details in store during the AMA session: There was no second expansion for Diablo 3 because Blizzard had to respond to community criticism.
