You’re arguing against a position nobody stated. My criticism isn’t that an IP ever appears in another genre. It is the pattern of publishers repurposing established strategy franchises into monetization-friendly live-service shooters because that market is larger and more predictable.
Warhammer is a poor comparison. Games like Vermintide didn’t replace or redefine Warhammer; they existed alongside a still-supported core genre identity. The RTS space around StarCraft has effectively been abandoned for years. So when the first meaningful revival rumor turns out to be a shooter, I read it less as expansion and more as substitution.
If Blizzard announced a new RTS and also a shooter spin-off, I would not be critical. The reaction is about genre displacement, not genre diversification.
So you would rather get no Starcraft games than get a Starcraft game that is not an RTS?
Because I don’t know if you’ve looked at the numbers but RTS is pretty much dead. One of the biggest RTS-s of the past 5 years was a remaster of Age of Mythology and that sold less than a million units. Starcraft 3 would have to sell something like 3 million units at launch and have an estimate of hitting at least 7 million in 2 years, because ActiBliz has certain expectation for sales and those expectations far exceed what Starcraft 2 sold in its entire lifetime. Starcraft would have to sell Diablo numbers.
I’d be very surprised if we ever saw another mainline Starcraft RTS. I don’t think we’ll be seeing another Warcraft RTS either.
Why would branching out with a successful IP be bad? Are you mad at all the Warhammer games? Does Vermintide’s existence cheapen the Total War games?
You’re arguing against a position nobody stated. My criticism isn’t that an IP ever appears in another genre. It is the pattern of publishers repurposing established strategy franchises into monetization-friendly live-service shooters because that market is larger and more predictable.
Warhammer is a poor comparison. Games like Vermintide didn’t replace or redefine Warhammer; they existed alongside a still-supported core genre identity. The RTS space around StarCraft has effectively been abandoned for years. So when the first meaningful revival rumor turns out to be a shooter, I read it less as expansion and more as substitution.
If Blizzard announced a new RTS and also a shooter spin-off, I would not be critical. The reaction is about genre displacement, not genre diversification.
So you would rather get no Starcraft games than get a Starcraft game that is not an RTS?
Because I don’t know if you’ve looked at the numbers but RTS is pretty much dead. One of the biggest RTS-s of the past 5 years was a remaster of Age of Mythology and that sold less than a million units. Starcraft 3 would have to sell something like 3 million units at launch and have an estimate of hitting at least 7 million in 2 years, because ActiBliz has certain expectation for sales and those expectations far exceed what Starcraft 2 sold in its entire lifetime. Starcraft would have to sell Diablo numbers.
I’d be very surprised if we ever saw another mainline Starcraft RTS. I don’t think we’ll be seeing another Warcraft RTS either.