There’s an interesting rumor about one of Blizzard’s biggest, and also most inactive, of franchises.
Xbox Twitter fan account KoreaXboxNews is fluent in Korean and English. He shared some news from Korean News website AsiaToday and provided this translation:
“Microsoft and Blizzard are looking to expand the StarCraft universe. Big Korean game publishers like NCSOFT, Nexon, Netmarble, and Krafton are in full-scale competition to develop new games based on the StarCraft IP and secure global publishing rights. Some of them travelled as far as the United States to pitch Blizzard in person.
NCsoft: Proposed to develop an RPG (MMORPG?) based on the StarCraft universe. Nexon: Proposed a unique way to utilize the StarCraft IP. Netmarble: Proposed to combine the StarCraft IP with mobile platforms. Krafton: Proposed to develop an entirely new StarCraft game.”
This news is certainly interesting, but some gamers reading this may be too young to understand why Korean game companies in particular are deeply interested in licensing StarCraft to make new StarCraft games.
This is because StarCraft became so popular in South Korea that it created a gigantic eSports industry in the country. The game became so ubiquitous that high-level StarCraft players who were conscripted into mandatory military service were directly transferred into the Army’s eSports teams. Since 2003, StarCraft players have enjoyed celebrity status in Korea.
Korea, of course, has grown its own million dollar video game industry, that was mostly only making them domestically, for mobile phones and PC “bangs” or netcafes. That industry matured in isolation from the rest of the world for years. Of course, with many of those studios branching out to the global market, we’ve now become very familiar with the likes of Krafton, Nexon, and NCSOFT.
What we think is really interesting is that Microsoft, or perhaps we should say, Blizzard, revealed that they were open to licensing the StarCraft IP. We do see that their studios are preoccupied with mostly Overwatch 2 and World of WarCraft. If the studio still has ideas or interest in making other games, they may not want to take the associated risks at the moment.
But this situation certainly feels like when Sega gave Sonic superfan Christian Whitehead, alongside Headcannon and PagodaWest games, the keys to the kingdom to make Sonic Mania. Maybe Korea’s StarCraft superfans, who also happen to now be making video games, would have better ideas on StarCraft games than Blizzard can come up with internally. As Phil Spencer once said, while he’d love to see new StarCraft games, he can’t directly make those decisions over Blizzard management. But this would be one way where Phil could get what he, and a lot of fans, want.
