Blizzard’s Latest Attempt at a StarCraft Shooter Reportedly in Development at Nexon

Blizzard has reportedly partnered with Korean gaming giant Nexon for yet another crack at turning StarCraft into a shooter.

While unconfirmed by Blizzard itself, the project is the subject of an article in The Korea Economic Daily, the country’s largest business newspaper. The report states that Nexon has a development team dedicated to the project within its shooter division, with a StarCraft modder installed as its project lead.

Blizzard has long held ambitions to launch a shooter spin-off from its sci-fi real-time strategy series, while Nexon has recently found Western success within the shooter space as the owner of Swedish development studio Embark Studio — the outfit behind The Finals and Arc Raiders.

Still, the report is cautious on the project’s development — noting that Nexon previously partnered with Square Enix to develop a Final Fantasy spin-off that faltered in the planning stages. A note of caution here is likely wise, too, considering Blizzard’s own track record on abandoned StarCraft spin-off projects.

StarCraft Ghost, announced in 2002, was Blizzard’s first attempt to expand the series beyond its real-time strategy origins. Planned as a tactical-action console game in which you played as a deadly Ghost operative in the employ of the Dominion, it was canceled in 2006 after a series of delays.

A second StarCraft shooter attempt, codenamed Ares, was canceled in 2019 so Blizzard could focus on Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2. Ares was reportedly “like Battlefield in the StarCraft universe,” but, like Ghost, fell by the wayside. Finally, in 2024, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier shared word of a third StarCraft shooter project then in development within Blizzard, with former Far Cry executive producer Dan Hay, who joined Blizzard in 2022, leading the charge.

Could Nexon’s shooter be the same project as the one Hay had been leading, or a new iteration of it? This remains unclear, especially since Hay’s project had apparently been in development two years ago, whereas Nexon’s game sounds more recent — and developed on a different continent. IGN has contacted Blizzard for more.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social