Blizzard Announcing Games For 2029 And 2030 Seems Nuts

Amid a bunch of news coming out of Blizzcon over the weekend, two items stood out: firstly, Diablo V is coming, and in what's probably the biggest announcement for a Blizzard game since Overwatch's original reveal, Starcraft is getting an open-world shooter.

While these will have some long-time fans excited as concepts, both are tempered by the fact that neither game is coming out this holiday season. Or the next. Or the next. Indeed Diablo V has a planned release for 2029, while the Starcraft shooter--at this point confusingly called just Starcraft--was announced for 2030.

That seems like an awfully long time away from September 2026 to be announcing big video games. A lot can happen between now and then. Think back to 2022, for example; could you have imagined the depths the entire video game industry would have sunk to just four years later? The radical changes taking place from top to bottom, impacting the platforms we play on and the publishers releasing major games like this? The emergence of a boycott of Microsoft’s products over its support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine? Probably not! And that's because things feel like they're falling apart quicker by the day; water circles the drain faster the closer it gets to the end, after all.

Microsoft might not own Blizzard by then. Somebody else might, or they could be independent, who knows! There might not be a Blizzard by then. There might not be an Xbox by then.

Even putting the collapse of the Western AAA industry to one side--and that's a big side--a lot can happen during the development of a video game in 3-4 years’ time. It could pivot, or stuff that looked good on paper might not work as intended within its wider context. Its story could change. It could get delayed. It could get cancelled.

The decision to announce both these games so early and so publicly is just so weird, because so much can go wrong (or even change) between now and then, especially when you consider that another Xbox-owned studio, Bethesda, is an existing case study in making the same mistake already. The Elder Scrolls VI was first announced eight years ago, and is nowhere near being ready, leaving fans in the kind of state that has Todd Howard asking them to "pretend we didn't announce it".

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Blizzard GM Dan Hay told GameSpot the reason they announced Starcraft so far out--with a cinematic trailer, and no gameplay footage or screenshots--was "We’ve been working on it for a little bit now, and we feel like we’ve got something that we wanted to show". Blizzard president Johanna Faries, meanwhile, told Bloomberg "We're a Blizzard that's going to ship, and ship big, and ship on time, and all hands on deck to set those projects up for success."

Then again, maybe that "Microsoft-owned" part is the key here. As Xbox tries desperately to remind the market that they once developed good video games, what better way to get one of their biggest companies to help pander to the core (and make a statement of intent) than to announce both a new Starcraft and Diablo game? Even if all they're announcing is a hope that, one day, one or both of these games is actually released!