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."
Former 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.
The genre's main champion at the company, Morten, and some developers on his team left around 2020 to eventually release an RTS of their own called Stormgate, leaving the fate of an eventual Warcraft 4 in limbo. Schreier mentions that Microsoft's acquisition may have opened the door for an RTS release to do well on Game Pass. The company is certainly on a strategy game kick with Age of Empires, Age of Mythology Retold, and Ara: History Untold.
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