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Blizzard hasn't dipped its toes into the real-time strategy waters in a hot minute, but it's reportedly not for a lack of trying. Developers "desperate" for an RTS return have reportedly pitched everything from Warcraft 4 to a Call of Duty spin-off to no luck.
The tidbit comes from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who recently held a Reddit AMA to promote his new book Play Nice in which he interviewed around 350 past and present employees from the storied company. In response to a question about Warcraft 4, Schreier adds the context that Blizzard's last game in the genre, StarCraft 2, "did pretty well but it didn't meet the company's lofty expectations.
StarcCraft 2 kicked things off strong with its initial 2010 release, but every entry in its trilogy of single-player expansions apparently "did worse than the last" before the whole project became free-to-play in 2017 "and again did well, but not Overwatch or Hearthstone well."
Article continues belowFormer Blizzard production director Tim Morten and other developers were apparently "desperate" to kick start a new RTS at the company, Schreier says, "making all sorts of pitches and prototypes, from Warcraft 4 to even, wildly, a Call of Duty RTS pitch. But there was no appetite among Blizzard's executive team for a new RTS game."
Warcraft 3: Reforged might have turned fortunes in the dev team's favor, but it became an absolute disaster for the company - "the company's first bad game and a blemish in Blizzard's history" - which probably didn't do much to convince Blizzard's c-suite.
Blizzard is reportedly “incubating” a StarCraft shooter after scrapping two other RTS spin-offs.
