They just abandon the entire RTS fan base.
This feels just like the diablo immortal announcement disaster where they announce a product that is completely outside the target audience.
I hope it's good, but it's really disappointing to not just have starcraft 3. Instead we get diablo 5? I wish I could feel positive about any of the blizzcon announcements, but it all feels like an out of touch joke.
RTS is pretty much a dead genre these days. There have been indie releases but nothing did well enough for a big studio to take notice. They tested the water with a Command and Conquer remaster a few years ago too.
What would be the point in making SC3? SC2 is free to play, great game, and still barely gets any players. I play against the same 30-40 people every time in ranked.
For all the flaws in how Nintendo treats fans of their IP, the games they put out themselves are consistently fun. Mario Kart still feels like Mario Kart even decades later, and not in stagnating/bad way.
Couldn't be more wrong. The market for new RTSs is too tiny and saturated to turn a profit on any new IP. The small existing player base is too entrenched to move away from the old established IPs that are still popular to something new and unproven.
Tempest Rising was taunted as the old school C&C RTS comeback and it ended as niche game with small player base and 9.5k player peak on Steam.
Probably best RTS game going on currently is Beyond All Reason, and that's because guys are doing it as an open source clone/followup to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander Alliances and not actual business (but they started to look for a way to monetize it to fund future development).
Gon on, as in you mean like to explain the obvious? Just google/chatgpt sales of RTS games vs shooters and other shit.
Good luck convincing an exec to give you 200 million $ to make a new RTS for the 50 player based market out there who's playing the oldies anyway: AOE, RA, SC, etc.
It's a small and saturated market that's long been fished out and no point investing into, other than HD remakes/remasters of previously mentioned established IP.
There is no one left at Blizzard with any RTS experience. They've long since left for smaller studios.
SC2 is my favorite game of all time and I would love nothing more than an SC3. But if there ever is to be a real spiritual successor it won't be from Blizzard.
An RTS game would generate lower revenue but higher profits. Low risk but low reward.
A shooter is a high risk high-reward endeavor. The track record for shooters for the past 5 years is actually much worse than it has been for RTS games, but the ceiling for success is much higher. In 2026 alone, several AAA shooters have failed in the market. Most of the shooters released in the past 2 years have failed to survive. The few that succeeded made a lot of money.
This is easily the most depressing thought I've encountered in a while. It's entirely accurate and combined with talk of AI regulation it paints a picture of a very bleak future indeed. Locked down hardware given away almost for free, permits and AI based monitoring required for anything with the computational power of a GPU from 10 years ago, and market prices that place 64 GB of RAM in the same ballpark as a brand new vehicle from the dealer.
It seems the industry has collectively and nearly unanimously decided that the Verification Can future is way less cringe and way more preferable than the future where we are writing YAML by hand*
Well, I suppose it's something that a Verge article held back from spoiling the trailer until just before where they embedded it in the article. Usually they put it right in the headline.
I wish people would stop supporting this trash site and let it die.
I hope it's good, but it's really disappointing to not just have starcraft 3. Instead we get diablo 5? I wish I could feel positive about any of the blizzcon announcements, but it all feels like an out of touch joke.
Ohh well
> Executive Producer on Far Cry 5
So it's safe to assume that's what they are aiming for.
Given that Marathon is unlikely to ever make a profit, Tempest Rising technically made infinitely more in profits than Marathon did.
Probably best RTS game going on currently is Beyond All Reason, and that's because guys are doing it as an open source clone/followup to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander Alliances and not actual business (but they started to look for a way to monetize it to fund future development).
Good luck convincing an exec to give you 200 million $ to make a new RTS for the 50 player based market out there who's playing the oldies anyway: AOE, RA, SC, etc.
It's a small and saturated market that's long been fished out and no point investing into, other than HD remakes/remasters of previously mentioned established IP.
SC2 is my favorite game of all time and I would love nothing more than an SC3. But if there ever is to be a real spiritual successor it won't be from Blizzard.
This is probably the safest thing they could do with the genre from a business perspective.
A shooter is a high risk high-reward endeavor. The track record for shooters for the past 5 years is actually much worse than it has been for RTS games, but the ceiling for success is much higher. In 2026 alone, several AAA shooters have failed in the market. Most of the shooters released in the past 2 years have failed to survive. The few that succeeded made a lot of money.
Companies still announcing big AAA games as if their customers will have the hardware necessary to run such games in 2030.
And people say I'm the one huffing copium.
* YAML, etc.
I wish people would stop supporting this trash site and let it die.