Blizzard’s RTS Rosy Future? Warcraft 4 and Call of Duty Spin-Offs Rejected as New Hope Awaits After Microsoft Acquisition

Blizzard hasn’t released a real-time strategy (RTS) game in a while, but it’s not for lack of trying. The developers of the studio, who were eager to bring RTS back, proposed ideas ranging from Warcraft 4 to an RTS spin-off of Call of Duty, but none of these projects were approved.

This information was revealed by Jason Schreier, who recently held an AMA on Reddit to promote his new book, Play Nice, based on interviews with 350 former and current Blizzard employees.

In response to a question about Warcraft 4, Schreier explained that the company’s latest strategy game, StarCraft 2, although it had a successful start in 2010, did not live up to Blizzard’s high expectations. Each new addition to the single-player campaign sold worse than the last, and by 2017 the game became free-to-play, which again made it popular, but not on the level of Overwatch or Hearthstone.

According to Schreier, former Blizzard representative Tim Morten and other developers were “desperate” in their efforts to launch a new RTS. They proposed several concepts and prototypes, including Warcraft 4 and even, unexpectedly, the RTS Call of Duty, but the company’s management was not interested in creating a new strategy.

The failure of Warcraft 3: Reforged, which Schreier says was “Blizzard’s first failed game and a setback to its reputation,” also did not add to management support for new RTS ideas.

Tim Morten and several other developers left the company around 2020 and founded their own studio, where they developed the RTS Stormgate. As for Warcraft 4, its fate is in doubt. However, Schreier mentioned that Blizzard’s acquisition of Microsoft could give RTS a new opportunity through the Game Pass platform, especially given the success of strategy titles such as Age of Empires, Age of Mythology Retold and Ara : History Untold.