15 years on, real-time strategy games are still chasing the high of 'StarCraft 2'

Remember when Blizzard Entertainment used to make strategy games? Even after the company turned much of its attention towards other genres — conquering the planet with World of Warcraft — StarCraft 2 arrived in 2010 to critical and player acclaim. But 15 years later, the StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty launch still feels like the last big hurrah of the real-time strategy (RTS) genre as a whole.

That's not to say the genre is extinct. Sure, most major publishers have abandoned it in favor of multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) releases like League of Legends or DOTA 2 — which ironically owe their births to Blizzard's 2002 masterpiece Warcraft 3 — but smaller studios and companies have stepped up to fill the void. We have countless indie teams trying to replicate the magic of the golden era of RTS games, and the recently announced Dawn of War 4 looks like it might be one to watch.

The exception to 'nobody in the AAA space is still working on RTS projects' might be Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios; Age of Empires — one of the undisputed greats of the genre — is still alive and regularly getting new entries, expansions, and smaller content packs. With Activision-Blizzard and everything under that dome now fully absorbed by Xbox, should we expect StarCraft 3 at any point in the future? It's complicated. We don't expect the powers that be to Zerg-rush into such a project, but hope isn't completely lost.

An overdue sequel with a twist

The original StarCraft and its Brood War expansion were released in the ancient year of 1998. Blizzard would later move on to Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and — of course — World of Warcraft and its expansions. By the mid-2000s, fans had lost almost all hope of ever seeing a second StarCraft game, but they were shocked on May 19, 2007, by the surprise announcement of a full-blown sequel that had actually been in development since 2003.

The bigger surprise was that Blizzard's plans for the sequel extended beyond a single story campaign. In June 2008, it was revealed that two expansions — Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void — would continue the campaign of Wings of Liberty, the base-game StarCraft 2 release. Did this mean Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan's return would be a short affair by the time it launched in 2010? Quite the opposite, as Wings of Liberty was a huge sci-fi epic that greatly expanded the Terran-Zerg-Protoss conflict, expertly deploying several plot twists to keep things interesting into the latter two installments.

Evolution was key to survival

StarCraft is all about three core factions. Humanity is represented by the Terran Dominion, but they're joined by two unique alien races: the insectoid Zerg and the psionically-charged Protoss. Each faction has a deep well of lore and, crucially, a distinct playstyle on the battlefield. It's entirely possible to be terrible with one faction but excel as one of the others.

Following critical acclaim in 2010, which also extended to the other two entries, StarCraft 2 evolved over the years by primarily targeting the hardcore crowd, while also expanding its mode selection to entice new players. Follow-up releases Heart of the Swarm (2013) and Legacy of the Void (2015) weren't just new massive story campaigns and a selection of extra maps and units; they substantially reshaped the systems and mechanics as the competitive multiplayer community around it grew older.

Substantial support continued until 2017, when StarCraft 2 fully embraced a free-to-play model for its base multiplayer and co-op modes, as well as the Wings of Liberty chapter of the campaign. With hundreds of millions in combined franchise revenue at that point, the move made sense to keep the three-part sequel alive for as much time as possible.

StarCraft 3: Is there a chance?

Fast-forward to 2025, and we're still playing StarCraft 2 for two key reasons: First, well, it's arguably the best RTS ever made. Second, it's a great space opera well worth revisiting every few years if you're more of a solo player. Few studios, no matter the genre, have achieved such heights of science fiction storytelling in video games. Sure, it's still a Blizzard game, so the story is a bit convoluted and world-salad-y at times, but it's rare to see this level of care put into the worldbuilding and characters, especially in an RTS. SC2 is often remembered as the last game in which Blizzard was firing on all cylinders, and even after all these years, it's easy to see why.

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty's production budget was reported to be below $100 million (but still quite expensive) in 2010, not taking into account the money that later went into finishing the expansions, as well as the years of post-launch support for each entry. Even back in the day, it was the sort of RTS behemoth that only Blizzard could afford to make with such production values, so is it realistic to expect a follow-up on that scale in the near future, with the genre barely breathing?

Considering the cost-cutting measures happening across the games industry as I write this and the dire state of affairs at Xbox specifically, I wouldn't hold my breath... for now. As stated before, Age of Empires is alive and kicking, and StarCraft is arguably the bigger IP despite only having two games, so it's hard to imagine Xbox never ever going back to this iconic RTS series. Don't be surprised if the next StarCraft project leaves behind its strategy roots, though.

StarCraft 2 is available on PC (Windows & macOS). The competitive and co-op multiplayer modes, as well as the first single-player campaign, are free-to-play. The whole collection is included with Game Pass subscriptions.