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.
The most ive done with RTS the last decade is watch some mass Beyond All Reason videos (I dont have the hardware for mass battles myself.) LoL and other moba dota-likes I think took the a bulk of the rts competative crowd. Now I feel like the traditional rts community has to butt heads with other strategy genres to take players if they want to approach old school rts levels of success. Trying to pull moba players back seems like it would have massive diminishing returns.
I think RTS could continue to work if someone made a massive leap of faith and put all the modern infra around it that a AAA extraction shooter would receive in 2026. The biggest problem with RTS is the matchmaking and onboarding experience.
The game itself doesn't have to be dumbed down (i.e., removing base building, etc.). Making the RTS simpler is NOT the solution to player adoption. Starcraft II has some extremely complex mechanics (Zerg production) which have survived for 16 years without significant changes.
The reality is that RTS is very much alive if you are willing to get your ass beat constantly. What I think many people are actually asking for is that nostalgic experience where everyone kind of sucked at these games and they could cheese their way to easy wins. RTS felt better when everyone was kind of bad. In a shooter you can still get lucky shots and catch people off guard. In an RTS, if someone is 1000 ELO better than you, the chances you defeat them are essentially zero.
Have you tried playing the Command and Conquer remaster? They barely upgraded the UI and it just doesn't feel like you're in command. Games move like your wading through molasses and you just win basically everything (except the online mode, where you have no chance whatsoever)
And there isn't much variation.
The cutscenes were almost the best part of the original game. Now they're really the only reason to even look.
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.
I don't really get why people just assume RTS means it's going to fail? Like what major RTS games have come out since Starcraft 2 (which was not a critical or commercial flop) that resulted in cementing the genre as being dead & guaranteed to be a commercial failure? Starcraft 2 and it's 2 expansions all broke 1 million sales in less than 24 hours. SC2 was at 6 million sales after 2 years. Yet we're all supposed to just take it as obvious that a SC3 would be a commercial flop? Why the fuck should we assume that?
Meanwhile how many AAA hero shooters and extraction shooters have we watched get released and been massive commercial flops? Yet we don't consider those to be dead genres?
Did you catch that we can't LAN with it? Might seem small, but that's how some of us still choose to play. Being able to host on our own terms is kind of the main reason we still play the ancient versions...
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.
Didn't know, that's pretty cool!
I do think Nintendo generally has a good sense of what they want from their games, so perhaps future generations will stay true to the current 'generation' of game leads.
Nintendo seems to be the outlier in the video games industry in that they are very much willing to foster talent over a long term. People who started doing sprite work 35 years ago are still there today and directing games. It's almost like the secret to long-term success is developing a roster of highly-skilled professionals, rather than treating your staff as disposable.
Unpopular opinion i am sure but i stopped playing Nintendo games years ago. All their main games are so derivative of their source mechanics that I get bored 10 minutes past the loading screen. At this point mariocart, mario world xxxi, zelda remake of a remake, they all feel like fifa or cod to me albeit far more polished.
Nintendo as a company is also extremely odious but that is a given of all companies these days so i give em a pass.
And, breath of the wild etc mechanics are almost all pulled directly from other open world games although they were a first for nintendo.
RTS games are a niche now so this makes total sense. No one has time for them esp on competitive scene where the older games perfectly capture what audience exists.
Games these days need to have an almost hard cap on a “round” or session wrt to time. I need to know that the game will be over within x minutes’ish. The attention span is small. Almost all indie games have adopted this structure.
What fans really want is NOT another competitive rts but more campaigns and coop. Neither will convinced execs to dump cash into it unless it is a live service game with dlcs. Sc2 did this for a bit with a coop mode that did ok but not ok enough to continue.
There must be more money in competitive play though. Not as much recently, but I remember a trend some years back of throwing even a large casual player base under the bus to cater to the competitive multiplayer scene.
One of the theories for part of the Civ6 flop is that they wanted to cater to multiplayer scenes which have different concerns from a casual single player. Removing hotseat is extremely egregious though and the one reason I’ve refused to give the game a chance. I’d be willing to look past the “Humankind ripoff lol” memes if I could play with my gf.
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.
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.
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).
>Tempest Rising made more in profits than Marathon
Choosing the biggest flop as your benchmark is a very poor argument. If you lose half as much money as Marathon, you're technically twice as good, but it's still a flop and investors and publishers want successes, not half flops.
Marathon existing does not justify the investments into new RTS games. Quite the contrary. Marathon got hundreds of millions in cash because the shooter genre was making billions (at the time) so for them it was worth the gamble even if they lost. But the RTS genre is not making nearly enough money to justify Marathon levels of gambling on new IPs.
Quite the contrary. Marathon got hundreds of millions in cash because the shooter genre was making billions (at the time) so for them it was worth the gamble even if they lost.
Two shooters were making billions at the time Marathon began pre-production (Fortnite and Destiny). Only two other live-service AAA shooters have made back their budgets (Apex Legends and The Division). Most live-action shooters generated huge losses; even Destiny wasn't doing great anymore by the time Sony acquired Bungie. Sony itself had a horrendous track record with live-service games (of any genre). Other than Final Fantasy Online they have no profitable live-service games developed internally (Destiny and Helldivers are both acquisitions).
But the RTS genre is not making nearly enough money to justify Marathon levels of gambling on new IPs.
We agree on the first half of that statement, but (a) RTS games don't need Marathon levels of gambling to be successful and (b) live-service shooters also aren't worth the gamble of Marathon levels of spending. Tempest Rising cost less than $10 million to develop, which is less than 1/25th of what Marathon cost. Starcraft 2, the most expensive RTS of all time, cost about $150 million (in today's dollars) and made that back in its first month and made at least $240 million in revenue before going free-to-play. COH3 cost somewhere between $25m and $50m, and earned approximately $50m in sales but also received significant tax incentives in Canada, for a modest profit. On the AA front, Iron Harvest cost approximately $5 million and grossed $15m ($10m going to the studio), for a 100% profit. Similarly, Zerospace has grossed over $5 million on a $2.5m budget.
Meanwhile, Fortnite, Destiny, Marathon, and Apex Legend revenues have all been trending downhill for several years. All of the studios behind these games have had sizable layoffs. Sony has lost more on Marathon alone than every AA and AAA RTS game's development budget in the last decade. To put it bluntly: the era of the live-service shooter is almost as dead as the RTS era. Fortnite is the only thing keeping the genre alive.
Objectively speaking, if the goal is to make a profit, RTSs are a lower risk than shooters. If the goal is to lose money, make a live-action shooter.
>Meanwhile, Fortnite, Destiny, Marathon, and Apex Legend revenues have all been trending downhill for several years.
Other games having done bad is not proof that your unique RTS will do good. That's my argument.
> If the goal is to lose money, make a live-action shooter.
When your examples that lost money got the green light to start development, the shooter market was very different which is why they got all that money to begin with. But then you take 5-7 years to ship, and by that time the market has changed, so they lost the gamble but that doesn't mean that at the time it was a bad business decision.
Meanwhile new RTS is known for the start it won't make any money since the young players are captured by MOBAs and boomers still play the OGs. That's also my argument.
>Objectively speaking, if the goal is to make a profit, RTSs are a lower risk than shooters.
Feel free to put your money where your mouth is. THere's some indie RTS games out there who probably need some money.
And how many copies are they gonna sell? How big is their player base?
All important things bean counters want to know before they pony up north of seven figures of investor money into another RTS and not into another looter shooter instead with a 100x revenue and 100x player base.
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.
Blizzard is getting a lot of vitriol and I don’t think it’s unwarranted. Yes, some of it might be melodramatic but I remember when Warcraft 3 was coming out. Or even Lord of the Clans. People were mega hyped.
This is a huge turn of the tide. Very little of the core fan base, if they even still have that, is interested. Both Diablo 5 and StarCraft 3 getting panned. Very strange of Blizzard to do this, especially as a fuck-you to people who bought Diablo 4 and now there’s no Diablo in it, unless they release a surprise expansion pack which would just be weird.
As for the trailer, it looks like a grimdark Warhammer 40K thing. I don’t know why they are releasing trailers so early. I’m guessing they’ll spend the next 3-4 years in constant marketing mode to drum up sales?
I don’t even get this company anymore. Who the fuck is in charge around here? And where’s our air support?
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.
Yes! Sorry if it was dumb.. I don't know a lot about StarCraft or sentiment around the Verge I guess. Was just curious!
The best I can guess is that the space marine mech guys don't ever die in the original games? So its a big deal to see that in the trailer, or have that detail written down?
Having the habit of spoiling in the headline is kinda just funny and I had no idea, would genuinely love some examples.
They also claim the trailer follows the United Earth Directorate from Brood War when they clearly mention the Terran Dominion in the trailer. It's a minor thing, but do these sites not have editors?
The trailer shows nothing. Mentions a couple of factions that have previously been established from the lore and shows some Space Marine montage footage that could have been a cutscene from the prior games. It is not gameplay and just as easily could be promotion material for a Starcraft 3 RTS.
There is a clear emotional arc that the trailer tries to construct, and the article demolishes it by revealing the twist/punchline. It's disrespectful to the artists that made the trailer, the devs who were relying on it to generate excitement for the game, and the viewers like me who had their experience ruined by knowing what was going to happen.
It's a 3-minute trailer. I don't think they spoiled anything.
Sure, the artists probably put tons of effort into it, but if you are reading an article instead of the short clip, then probably you didn't care about it as much anyway?
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.
That’s fine, just let it die. But they gotta milk the goddamn IP dry.
It's been like 11 years since the last game, it seems a bit reactionary to call that "milking the goddamn IP dry."
The most ive done with RTS the last decade is watch some mass Beyond All Reason videos (I dont have the hardware for mass battles myself.) LoL and other moba dota-likes I think took the a bulk of the rts competative crowd. Now I feel like the traditional rts community has to butt heads with other strategy genres to take players if they want to approach old school rts levels of success. Trying to pull moba players back seems like it would have massive diminishing returns.
I think RTS could continue to work if someone made a massive leap of faith and put all the modern infra around it that a AAA extraction shooter would receive in 2026. The biggest problem with RTS is the matchmaking and onboarding experience.
The game itself doesn't have to be dumbed down (i.e., removing base building, etc.). Making the RTS simpler is NOT the solution to player adoption. Starcraft II has some extremely complex mechanics (Zerg production) which have survived for 16 years without significant changes.
The reality is that RTS is very much alive if you are willing to get your ass beat constantly. What I think many people are actually asking for is that nostalgic experience where everyone kind of sucked at these games and they could cheese their way to easy wins. RTS felt better when everyone was kind of bad. In a shooter you can still get lucky shots and catch people off guard. In an RTS, if someone is 1000 ELO better than you, the chances you defeat them are essentially zero.
According to?
I play AoE2 and it’s still growing.
Have you tried playing the Command and Conquer remaster? They barely upgraded the UI and it just doesn't feel like you're in command. Games move like your wading through molasses and you just win basically everything (except the online mode, where you have no chance whatsoever)
And there isn't much variation.
The cutscenes were almost the best part of the original game. Now they're really the only reason to even look.
I knew RTS was dead when they started porting AoE games to console.
Yup, it is. MOBA replaced most of it (which DOTA innovated). I don't like MOBA at all, but neither do I like PvP RTS.
I believe Destiny proved an open world shooter in this genre can work.
Also, didnt they announce a Warcraft HOTS?
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.
> They just abandon the entire RTS fan base
They did announce a new Warcraft 3 expansion at Blizzcon too.
They literally released a 30 hour Warcraft campaign yesterday.
Making an rts in 2026. They are not a charity my guy. If you must capitalize on nostalgia you are better off making an mmo.
That said i do not trust blizzard to make anything that isnt lame and slop.
I don't really get why people just assume RTS means it's going to fail? Like what major RTS games have come out since Starcraft 2 (which was not a critical or commercial flop) that resulted in cementing the genre as being dead & guaranteed to be a commercial failure? Starcraft 2 and it's 2 expansions all broke 1 million sales in less than 24 hours. SC2 was at 6 million sales after 2 years. Yet we're all supposed to just take it as obvious that a SC3 would be a commercial flop? Why the fuck should we assume that?
Meanwhile how many AAA hero shooters and extraction shooters have we watched get released and been massive commercial flops? Yet we don't consider those to be dead genres?
> They just abandon the entire RTS fan base
A full warcraft III expansion is not nothing
Did you catch that we can't LAN with it? Might seem small, but that's how some of us still choose to play. Being able to host on our own terms is kind of the main reason we still play the ancient versions...
I have absolutely no faith in Microsoft to make anything decent with its legacy IPs.
Ohh well
Meanwhile, Nintendo with a tiny fraction of MS market cap is absolutely killing it with their legacy IP.
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.
The original creators of Mario Kart are still involved in the latest entries (a 34-year run!) Thats not common outside Nintendo.
Didn't know, that's pretty cool! I do think Nintendo generally has a good sense of what they want from their games, so perhaps future generations will stay true to the current 'generation' of game leads.
Nintendo seems to be the outlier in the video games industry in that they are very much willing to foster talent over a long term. People who started doing sprite work 35 years ago are still there today and directing games. It's almost like the secret to long-term success is developing a roster of highly-skilled professionals, rather than treating your staff as disposable.
Unpopular opinion i am sure but i stopped playing Nintendo games years ago. All their main games are so derivative of their source mechanics that I get bored 10 minutes past the loading screen. At this point mariocart, mario world xxxi, zelda remake of a remake, they all feel like fifa or cod to me albeit far more polished.
Nintendo as a company is also extremely odious but that is a given of all companies these days so i give em a pass.
And, breath of the wild etc mechanics are almost all pulled directly from other open world games although they were a first for nintendo.
« as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced »
I was wondering what do they exactly mean by "open-world shooter", and checked that Dan Hay guy:
> Executive Producer on Far Cry 5
So it's safe to assume that's what they are aiming for.
Wasn't this starcraft ghost?
Kind of. That one was closer to C&C Renegade.
RTS games are a niche now so this makes total sense. No one has time for them esp on competitive scene where the older games perfectly capture what audience exists.
Games these days need to have an almost hard cap on a “round” or session wrt to time. I need to know that the game will be over within x minutes’ish. The attention span is small. Almost all indie games have adopted this structure.
What fans really want is NOT another competitive rts but more campaigns and coop. Neither will convinced execs to dump cash into it unless it is a live service game with dlcs. Sc2 did this for a bit with a coop mode that did ok but not ok enough to continue.
There must be more money in competitive play though. Not as much recently, but I remember a trend some years back of throwing even a large casual player base under the bus to cater to the competitive multiplayer scene.
One of the theories for part of the Civ6 flop is that they wanted to cater to multiplayer scenes which have different concerns from a casual single player. Removing hotseat is extremely egregious though and the one reason I’ve refused to give the game a chance. I’d be willing to look past the “Humankind ripoff lol” memes if I could play with my gf.
And a Diablo 5 in 2029? https://youtu.be/GxCN_AKYtts?is=AgY1pqrkutISphr1
we are definitely getting AGI before a new starcraft
Release dates is why Rust implemented the Never type https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49625056
I've heard this story before, and from the same people... no thanks.
is this “Helldivers 2”, but StarCraft?
Helldivers 2 isn't open-world, so probably not.
Even a half hearted RTS would be better recived, how can they not know that?
StarCraft 2 is really hard to beat.
This is probably the safest thing they could do with the genre from a business perspective.
Financially incorrect, it seems.
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.
Go on?
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.
MOBAs largely absorbed the younger player base that would have been into traditional RTS games. The whole genre came out of a Warcraft mod.
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).
Taunted = vaunted?
Maybe they meant "touted" instead of "taunted".
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tout
Tempest Rising made more in profits than Marathon, despite selling a fraction as many copies.
Given that Marathon is unlikely to ever make a profit, Tempest Rising technically made infinitely more in profits than Marathon did.
>Tempest Rising made more in profits than Marathon
Choosing the biggest flop as your benchmark is a very poor argument. If you lose half as much money as Marathon, you're technically twice as good, but it's still a flop and investors and publishers want successes, not half flops.
Marathon existing does not justify the investments into new RTS games. Quite the contrary. Marathon got hundreds of millions in cash because the shooter genre was making billions (at the time) so for them it was worth the gamble even if they lost. But the RTS genre is not making nearly enough money to justify Marathon levels of gambling on new IPs.
Quite the contrary. Marathon got hundreds of millions in cash because the shooter genre was making billions (at the time) so for them it was worth the gamble even if they lost.
Two shooters were making billions at the time Marathon began pre-production (Fortnite and Destiny). Only two other live-service AAA shooters have made back their budgets (Apex Legends and The Division). Most live-action shooters generated huge losses; even Destiny wasn't doing great anymore by the time Sony acquired Bungie. Sony itself had a horrendous track record with live-service games (of any genre). Other than Final Fantasy Online they have no profitable live-service games developed internally (Destiny and Helldivers are both acquisitions).
But the RTS genre is not making nearly enough money to justify Marathon levels of gambling on new IPs.
We agree on the first half of that statement, but (a) RTS games don't need Marathon levels of gambling to be successful and (b) live-service shooters also aren't worth the gamble of Marathon levels of spending. Tempest Rising cost less than $10 million to develop, which is less than 1/25th of what Marathon cost. Starcraft 2, the most expensive RTS of all time, cost about $150 million (in today's dollars) and made that back in its first month and made at least $240 million in revenue before going free-to-play. COH3 cost somewhere between $25m and $50m, and earned approximately $50m in sales but also received significant tax incentives in Canada, for a modest profit. On the AA front, Iron Harvest cost approximately $5 million and grossed $15m ($10m going to the studio), for a 100% profit. Similarly, Zerospace has grossed over $5 million on a $2.5m budget.
Meanwhile, Fortnite, Destiny, Marathon, and Apex Legend revenues have all been trending downhill for several years. All of the studios behind these games have had sizable layoffs. Sony has lost more on Marathon alone than every AA and AAA RTS game's development budget in the last decade. To put it bluntly: the era of the live-service shooter is almost as dead as the RTS era. Fortnite is the only thing keeping the genre alive.
Objectively speaking, if the goal is to make a profit, RTSs are a lower risk than shooters. If the goal is to lose money, make a live-action shooter.
>Meanwhile, Fortnite, Destiny, Marathon, and Apex Legend revenues have all been trending downhill for several years.
Other games having done bad is not proof that your unique RTS will do good. That's my argument.
> If the goal is to lose money, make a live-action shooter.
When your examples that lost money got the green light to start development, the shooter market was very different which is why they got all that money to begin with. But then you take 5-7 years to ship, and by that time the market has changed, so they lost the gamble but that doesn't mean that at the time it was a bad business decision.
Meanwhile new RTS is known for the start it won't make any money since the young players are captured by MOBAs and boomers still play the OGs. That's also my argument.
>Objectively speaking, if the goal is to make a profit, RTSs are a lower risk than shooters.
Feel free to put your money where your mouth is. THere's some indie RTS games out there who probably need some money.
Starcraft III would be as far from a new IP as you could go while still making an RTS. Except for a Warcraft IV, I guess.
>Starcraft III would be as far from a new IP as you could go while still making an RTS
What are existing players missing from Starcraft 2 to justify buying Starcraft 3 so that Blizzard can justify the money to develop it?
Guy you're out of touch
There's quite a few new RTS games coming out
>There's quite a few new RTS games coming out
And how many copies are they gonna sell? How big is their player base?
All important things bean counters want to know before they pony up north of seven figures of investor money into another RTS and not into another looter shooter instead with a 100x revenue and 100x player base.
Starcraft 2 was over 6 million sales before its final expansion even came out.
That seems like the obvious player base for a Starcraft 3, and it seems more than large enough for a major release.
So instead of serving StarCraft’s dedicated fan base, they’re going to directly compete with the likes of Halo and GTA.
StarCraft: Ghost all over again.
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.
Problem is I don't want a spiritual successor. I want an actual successor that would build on the Starcraft universe, but in an RTS.
If you're a fan of single player checkout the mod scene. It's very good. UED First Light is excellent.
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.
Blizzard is getting a lot of vitriol and I don’t think it’s unwarranted. Yes, some of it might be melodramatic but I remember when Warcraft 3 was coming out. Or even Lord of the Clans. People were mega hyped.
This is a huge turn of the tide. Very little of the core fan base, if they even still have that, is interested. Both Diablo 5 and StarCraft 3 getting panned. Very strange of Blizzard to do this, especially as a fuck-you to people who bought Diablo 4 and now there’s no Diablo in it, unless they release a surprise expansion pack which would just be weird.
As for the trailer, it looks like a grimdark Warhammer 40K thing. I don’t know why they are releasing trailers so early. I’m guessing they’ll spend the next 3-4 years in constant marketing mode to drum up sales?
I don’t even get this company anymore. Who the fuck is in charge around here? And where’s our air support?
The trailer looks really good! Accurate.
The trailer != the game, since there was no gameplay footage.
this will only be cool if the open shooter is a submeta game of some random south koreas going for gold at the olympics.
you can milk anything with nipples.
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.
Consoles sold at a loss before. They can do that again if it enables selling software, which often has pretty fantastic margins.
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.
Please drink Verfication Can™ to continue playing PEPSI™ Presents: Bubsy 3D™ Legends™
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*
* YAML, etc.
Idk I had a lot of fun playing Halo 2 as a teenager
Clowns
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.
How did they spoil the trailer for you? What's an example of them doing it in the headline?
Is this a serious question?
Yes! Sorry if it was dumb.. I don't know a lot about StarCraft or sentiment around the Verge I guess. Was just curious!
The best I can guess is that the space marine mech guys don't ever die in the original games? So its a big deal to see that in the trailer, or have that detail written down?
Having the habit of spoiling in the headline is kinda just funny and I had no idea, would genuinely love some examples.
I have no idea what you could consider a spoiler for a three minute trailer that's nothing but vibes.
It’s a trailer, you really think that’s something that can be spoiled? Do you get mad if someone spoils a Super Bowl ad?
Yes.
They also claim the trailer follows the United Earth Directorate from Brood War when they clearly mention the Terran Dominion in the trailer. It's a minor thing, but do these sites not have editors?
!SPOILERS!
The trailer shows nothing. Mentions a couple of factions that have previously been established from the lore and shows some Space Marine montage footage that could have been a cutscene from the prior games. It is not gameplay and just as easily could be promotion material for a Starcraft 3 RTS.
There is a clear emotional arc that the trailer tries to construct, and the article demolishes it by revealing the twist/punchline. It's disrespectful to the artists that made the trailer, the devs who were relying on it to generate excitement for the game, and the viewers like me who had their experience ruined by knowing what was going to happen.
It's a 3-minute trailer. I don't think they spoiled anything.
Sure, the artists probably put tons of effort into it, but if you are reading an article instead of the short clip, then probably you didn't care about it as much anyway?