Given how ActiBlizz doesn't even want to acknowledge Starcrafts existence anymore, excluding it from Blizzcon e-sport highlights and leaving the broken ranked system unfixed for I don't even know long it's been, I believe change in company culture there would need to be pretty substantial to bring some love back to Starcraft.

Moreover I recall them saying SC2 was the final chapter on the IP.

I mean now that MS owns them maybe they can pull a Win11 :p

They catapulted over the shark with the conclusion of SC2's campaign, so it wouldn't surprise me, buuut if I've learned anything in this era of reboots, it's that no IP is really dead, some of them just hibernate for a while, and promises a popular franchise is done aren't worth the electrons inconvenienced to convey it.

I'm not so sure. Microsoft recently revived their Age of Empires franchise, and has has been pretty good about supporting it as an e-sport (sponsoring tournaments & streamers, reliably re-balancing, releasing updated versions, etc.). I wouldn't be surprised if they took a long term view for the much-larger-RTS Starcraft, especially given its size relative to AoE.

Wait, did they start putting effort into Hearthstone? I stopped playing a couple of years ago. To me, the bellwether is whether the game still locks up for a second right before a match starts as it synchronously produces a megabyte of logs or something.

The game never really felt that great after Ben Brode left. Battlegrounds was pretty OK though.

They put a lot of effort into their new game mode (which might as well be an entirely separate game from Hearthstone), but by all indications it flopped pretty hard.

There has been more activity than normal on the core game mode and Battlegrounds, although mostly focused on content (whether actual cards or cosmetics) than actual technology changes or new features.

Yep. Overwatch is an empty husk of a game and community it once was.