I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up, but with BlizzCon 2026 now just over a week away, it really is starting to look like something—possibly something big—is happening in the world of StarCraft.
The excitement began earlier this week when Korea’s Chosun (Google translated, via WCCFTech) ran a story saying Nexon is close to finalizing a deal to develop a new game based on the StarCraft series. As Chosun noted, the series has been dormant since StarCraft Remastered in 2017; the last original StarCraft game, StarCraft 2, arrived all the way back in 2010. Despite that, the series remains hugely popular in Korea.
The StarCraft subreddit took some issues with the report: For one thing, Chosun suggested the new game would be StarCraft 3, rather than the StarCraft shooter Nexon is reportedly working on. There are also concerns that the report might be accurate, given CEO Junghun Lee’s enthusiasm for generative AI and microtransactions. Still, the timing seemed right: BlizzCon 2026 runs September 12-13, which is now less than two weeks away.
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That’s how things remained until earlier today, when the StarCraft website started glitching, in the way that doesn’t happen unless it’s intentional: Images twitching, text flashing, all that sort of thing. The classic loss of signal right before something happens—that’s probably not a coincidence, right?
It’s a bit more conspiracy-coded, but the WoW subreddit has also noticed a rather peculiar gap in the main stage schedule—about an hour, early on the first day, that’s unaccounted for. What might fit into that hour? Well, anything that takes 60 minutes or less, really, but the prevailing opinion seems to be StarCraft.
Whatever the situation, that gap is definitely there:
Our resident Blizzard pro Tyler Colp cast his wizened eye upon the BlizzCon floor map and saw nothing carved out for StarCraft, so even if a new game is announced, it likely won’t be playable—although it’s possible Blizzard is camouflaging a demo area in the Well of Eternity or whatever.
The rumored Nexon shooter isn’t the only StarCraft spinoff game that may be in the works: Blizzard was reportedly “incubating” a StarCraft shooter of its own in 2024, under the guidance of former Far Cry director Dan Hay. It doesn’t strike me as especially likely that two StarCraft shooters are in development simultaneously, but Hay’s LinkedIn indicates that he’s still a Blizzard, so at the very least it doesn’t appear that he’s found a new home for himself and his project at Nexon.
Adding to that, earlier this year Blizzard was looking to hire a “lead designer of innovation” for an open world shooter using Unreal Engine, the studio recently dropped a major patch for StarCraft 2, and most recently, it revealed that this year’s BlizzCon rewards will include a 15-day co-op XP boost for Commander progression in StarCraft 2. That’s pretty small, sure, but as Tyler said, this is the kind of stuff that gets fans wound up real good.
Given all the shooter hints, it doesn’t seem very likely to me that a StarCraft 3 RTS will be the big announcement—if there is in fact a big announcement at all. A shooter would also seem to comport with Microsoft’s post-Phil Spencer strategy of focusing on games with the potential to go over big with mass audiences. Anything’s possible, and frankly I think actual StarCraft 3 would provide a much more immediate boost to Microsoft’s gamer cred than an all-new shooter. But is Microsoft really going to take a risk on a niche genre when it’s cancelling big survival games and MMOs? I suspect not.
One way or another, we’ll find out soon enough—BlizzCon opening ceremonies kick off at 10:30 am PT/1:30 pm ET on September 12. I’ve reached out to Blizzard and Nexon for comment and if anyone spills the beans, I’ll let you know.
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