Blizzard is seemingly interested in expanding its market for the StarCraft and Overwatch franchises through mobile games. While no confirmation has been made so far, a report by Korean publication MTN indicates that Blizzard is looking to team up with Nexon to release smartphone games based on Overwatch and StarCraft.
According to the report, Blizzard has been accepting bids from Korean development studios that could potentially use the StarCraft and Overwatch IPs. The licensing for both IPs are said to be a package deal, along with rights to publish and service the games in the Japanese and Korean markets.
It is worth noting that both StarCraft and Overwatch are quite popular IPs in Korea. StarCraft, especially, has been credited as being one of the games to essentially birth the market for eSports as we know it in this day, thanks to the Korean market accepting the game with open arms.
According to MTN, the competition for this bidding war has been fierce owing to the popularity of the StarCraft IP in Korea. The report notes, however, that any studio that takes on the IP would have to surpass StarCraft 2 in terms of gameplay to gain a foothold. The report also notes that StarCraft could potentially be adapted into a MOBA or card game, but such titles would suffer from not being able to make use of the StarCraft IP to its full extent.
As for Overwatch Mobile, according to the report, the fact that distribution rights would be limited to Korea and Japan has been a sticking point, with companies wanting global rights instead.
Blizzard has been largely quiet when it comes to StarCraft, since announcing back in 2020 that no more content would be developed for StarCraft 2. The last major release in the franchise was StarCraft: Remastered all the way back in 2017.
A rumour from September 2024 indicated that Blizzard has been quietly working on a new game in the StarCraft franchise. Rather than being an RTS follow-up to StarCraft 2, however, the rumour indicates that the game is instead a shooter. The project, stated at the time to be in its early stages of development, was being headed up by the team from the since-cancelled Odyssey project. Far Cry veteran developer Dan Hay is said to be heading up the development of this spinoff.
More recently, StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft 2: Campaign Collection have both been available to play on PC Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate since November last year. The multiplayer parts of StarCraft 2 is available as a free-to-play game through Blizzard’s Battle.net launcher.
Overwatch 2, on the other hand, is also available as a free-to-play title across PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch. For more details, check out the animated trailer released for Freja from back in March. Also check out details of Overwatch 2 Season 15.
