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.
They spoiled the twist ending to the trailer. It's right there in the article, right before where the video was linked/embedded. It's unavoidable if you engage with the article in good faith as a reader. I don't understand what you're arguing.
>Tempest Rising made more in profits than Marathon
Choosing the biggest flop as your benchmark is very poor an 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 flops.
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.
hen 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.
No, it wasn't. You are just ignoring the dates. When Marathon got the green light, the shooter industry was already a feast-or-famine niche, with most entrants starving to death.
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.
Which is false. Almost every AA and AAA RTS in the last decade has made a profit. My point is that they don't make much of a profit, but a small profit is better than a huge loss.
Feel free to put your money where your mouth is. THere's some indie RTS games out there who probably need some money.
I probably already have purchased them.
By the way, I used to work in the video game industry, so my knowledge is firsthand.
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.
GTA 6 preorders beat that in like a week and the game isn't even out and no gameplay footage was even show.
>That seems like the obvious player base for a Starcraft 3
A lot of that player based has aged out of the game or will stick to playing SC2 instead of spending 80-100$ on buying the same game over again. RTS have reached diminishing returns. There's not much more you can add to SC2 to improve it and convince people to spend on buying a new game. SC2 is feature complete.
> GTA 6 preorders beat that in like a week and the game isn't even out and no gameplay footage was even show.
Really? That's going to be your measuring stick? So anything that isn't as successful as GTA 6 is a failure that shouldn't ever exist again? In fact any genre that isn't as successful as GTA 6 should just be wholesale cancelled?
A game is successful if it makes a profit. Other games making more profit doesn't suddenly make them failures. This isn't a zero-sum game.
> A lot of that player based has aged out of the game
What does this even mean? Gamers don't "age out". We're long past the era of pretending Nintendo is a children's toy...
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.
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*
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.
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...
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?
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.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 40.9 ms ] threadI wish people would stop supporting this trash site and let it die.
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.
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.
Given that Marathon is unlikely to ever make a profit, Tempest Rising technically made infinitely more in profits than Marathon did.
Choosing the biggest flop as your benchmark is very poor an 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 flops.
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.
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.
No, it wasn't. You are just ignoring the dates. When Marathon got the green light, the shooter industry was already a feast-or-famine niche, with most entrants starving to death.
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.
Which is false. Almost every AA and AAA RTS in the last decade has made a profit. My point is that they don't make much of a profit, but a small profit is better than a huge loss.
Feel free to put your money where your mouth is. THere's some indie RTS games out there who probably need some money.
I probably already have purchased them.
By the way, I used to work in the video game industry, so my knowledge is firsthand.
Which AAA RETS games? How much profit?
What are existing players missing from Starcraft 2 to justify buying Starcraft 3 so that Blizzard can justify the money to develop it?
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.
That seems like the obvious player base for a Starcraft 3, and it seems more than large enough for a major release.
GTA 6 preorders beat that in like a week and the game isn't even out and no gameplay footage was even show.
>That seems like the obvious player base for a Starcraft 3
A lot of that player based has aged out of the game or will stick to playing SC2 instead of spending 80-100$ on buying the same game over again. RTS have reached diminishing returns. There's not much more you can add to SC2 to improve it and convince people to spend on buying a new game. SC2 is feature complete.
Really? That's going to be your measuring stick? So anything that isn't as successful as GTA 6 is a failure that shouldn't ever exist again? In fact any genre that isn't as successful as GTA 6 should just be wholesale cancelled?
A game is successful if it makes a profit. Other games making more profit doesn't suddenly make them failures. This isn't a zero-sum game.
> A lot of that player based has aged out of the game
What does this even mean? Gamers don't "age out". We're long past the era of pretending Nintendo is a children's toy...
StarCraft: Ghost all over again.
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.
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.
Ohh well
* YAML, etc.
> Executive Producer on Far Cry 5
So it's safe to assume that's what they are aiming for.
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.
That said i do not trust blizzard to make anything that isnt lame and slop.
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?
A full warcraft III expansion is not nothing
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?
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.