A new Starcraft game has been the subject of discussion for a while now, and this morning, Money Today Broadcasting (MTN) announced Nexon had won the bid to work on a new game in the franchise. In addition, Nexon has also been selected as the publisher for a mobile version of Overwatch.
The report doesn’t state what style of game the new Starcraft might be, but it probably won’t be an RTS. There’s a lot of evidence that it will be a shooter of some sort, as first claimed last year by Jason Schreier’s book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. There have also been several job listing at Blizzard that point to the development of an “open-world shooter,” although none specifically stated it would be part of the Starcraft IP.
However, Nexon developed The Finals, a fast-paced free-to-play shooter that still maintains a strong player base — an impressive feat at a time when live-service games struggle to last beyond the initial surge of interest.
“Blizzard has been bidding since the fourth quarter of last year for major Korean game companies, offering content development rights using the ‘Starcraft‘ IP and the Korean and Japanese service rights for ‘Overwatch Mobile‘ as a package deal,” the report reads. “In addition to Nexon, NC and Netmarble also participated in the bidding enthusiastically.”
It’s originally in Korean, so we’re at the mercy of Google Translate, but the gist is clear: there’s a lot of enthusiasm among companies to continue the franchise. The report continues, “It is known that domestic game companies that participated in the bidding made various proposals, such as developing spin-off new games using the ‘Starcraft’ IP, developing UGC and platforms using the ‘Starcraft’ IP, etc. It is not known what type of bid Nexon submitted.”
While we would love to see another RTS join the ranks — after all, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty was fantastic — it seems far more likely that the new title will be a shooter, perhaps following in the footsteps of the canceled Starcraft: Ghost. Nexon will be working in collaboration with Blizzard; between Overwatch and The Finals, the two are a powerhouse team.
