TLDR: they aren’t making money from it any more, so they aren’t going to bother with more features. They’ll keep the servers running and keep tweaking the balance to keep things fun because that’s not too hard, but the number of full-time employees supporting StarCraft 2 may be as much as zero.

Great tl;dr!

Sounds to me that they needed to move people from Starcraft team to making mobile version of Starcraft for the Chinese market. They also recognize, that Starcraft is such a phenomena that marketing dollars to get equivalent exposure any other way is going to be a lot more expensive than keeping a small team which keeps it alive.

Have they made hints of making a mobile version of sc? Are there any similar style games on mobile at the moment? It would seem pretty difficult to move this kind of game to mobile.

That's the Blizzcon 2018 Diablo Immortal reference... Shouldn't take it's literal interpretation as gospel. But overall direction of company seems to be making mobile games for Chinese market.

10 years is a pretty good life time and since they're not shutting down anything, this seems reasonable.

This company has given me so much, you simply cannot criticise. I still remember spending all night on battlenet playing sc1 back in the day. Big bottle of coke, some candy, headphones on and I was just transported. Loved that game. Never got into sc2 as much, maybe I will get it out and try over.

The guy making this announcement is from their classic games department.

The other department is mobile games.

you can still play the original Starcraft for free on BattleNet. If that’s still going I don’t see why Starcraft 2 should be of any concern in the foreseeable future.

how much does this have to do w/ Activision layoffs?

Blizzard loves their games...upper management/CEO of Activision, not so much as their revenue..

They put games into ‘maintenance’ mode when they realize they need to move on from it. Here is a similar press release for their MOBA from about last year:

https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/blizzard/22833558/heroes-of-...

They’ve gotten pretty corporate to be honest since Activision took over.

Anyway, seems like the main focus going forward will be Diablo 4, Overwatch 2 and WoW expansions.

It does not sound like "we care about our product" when you killed it in the first place.

Updating a game 10 years after being released is a sign to me that they care.

I find it interesting that he signs off with "uhn dara ma'nakai" -- Protoss for "our duty is unending". Truly a motto for those who have to support a piece of software over the long haul.

Grabbing as much cash as they can isn't caring.

As a StarCraft fan Blizzard has kept me quite happy, and I believe commanders and war chests just felt like the cash grab part of support anyway