Blizzard Allegedly Incubating A StarCraft Shooter

StarCraft is one of Blizzard’s most well-revered franchises, and there hasn’t been any new content for the franchise since 2017, which is when the remastered version of StarCraft was released. Prior to that, the latest content was in 2016 for StarCraft II, adding an expansion to the game. During the Unlocked podcast, Jason Schreier joined them to speak about his new book, which involved him sharing some wild stories about his time at Blizzard. In this podcast, Schreier said that Blizzard is allegedly incubating a StarCraft shooter, with the project being led by Dan Hay, the Executive Director for Far Cry.

In this podcast, they discuss his new book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, which also covers some of their not publicly known secrets, as well as the incubated StarCraft Shooter. This alleged shooter comes after they previously were working on two StarCraft projects but both have been canceled. StarCraft: Ghost was intended to be a shooter-style game that would tie into the franchise and was announced in 2002.  With development being delayed, the development got handed over to Swingin’ Ape Studios, before that studio was bought by Blizzard. It wasn’t until 2014 that the game was officially noted as canceled by Blizzard President Mike Morhaime.

Additionally discussed was the canceled shooter StarCraft: Ares. Ares was just the codename for the game, which had reportedly been in development since 2017 before it was canceled in early June 2019.

Fast forward to present day, and it seems as if Blizzard is still sat on a StarCraft shooter. However, none of the participants speaking in the podcast, including Schreier himself have much faith that the StarCraft shooter will go ahead, considering the first two attempts at developing one have both been canceled.  According to his updated knowledge, the StarCraft shooter is still in development at Blizzard. He states that the game is still in production according to the time he finished writing his current book, which is releasing on October 8.

Although his book wasn’t written with the purpose of telling scoops on upcoming games, he does state that he included it as it was “an interesting, useful nugget to include” because Blizzard can’t seem to stop themselves from trying to revive a franchise with new games, even if they never see the light of day. “Blizzard cannot quit StarCraft shooters. They cannot, you just can’t say goodbye to them,” says Schreier on the subject.