Background

From World of Starcraft Wiki

1 Facts
2 Speculations
3 References

Nothing has been announced yet about a "World of Starcraft" or "Starcraft Online" game, but there are bits and pieces of information that lead us to believe that a Starcraft MMO is in development at Blizzard. If you've got anything new to report please join us and edit this page or hop over to the forums and post it there.

[edit] Facts

April, 2007: Blizzard adds three new positions on their job openings page for an unspecified "next-gen MMO".

November 2007: Blizzard adds more job openings for the MMO project. This time for a physics programmer. Applicants need to have "programming experience on both console and PC titles".

June 2008: Rob Pardo, Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard: He confirms in an interview at the WWI in Paris, that Diablo 3 isn’t the secret MMO: “..Diablo 3 isn’t an MMO,” Pardo says, “So we have another development team.” (Editor’s Note: that should be Team 3)

June 2008: Paul Sams, Blizzard’s Chief Operating Officer: Confirmed in an interview with Gamasutra that no new IPs are coming soon. “Are we ever going to release a new [franchise]?” Sams says, “I would absolutely say we will at some point. I just don’t know when that day will be quite yet.”

So let’s recap the current situation with Blizzards major franchises keeping in mind that no new Blizzard IP is to be expected anytime soon:

World of Warcraft: the game is still doing well and Blizzard has projected the lifespan for WoW to be approximately 10 years. That would put a sequel quite far away.

Diablo: The non MMO successor has just been announced. But even IF Blizzard had a Diablo MMO in the works it would probably cannibalize on the WoW subscriber base due to the relatively similar background.

Starcraft: Starcraft 2 has been announced on last year’s WWI and similar to Diablo 3, the title has strong multiplayer capabilities but is definitely not an MMO. The difference is that unlike with a Diablo MMO, a Starcraft MMO would not interfere with the WoW subscribers but instead would open a MMO market for Blizzard without any real competition except maybe for Anarchy Online.