Nexon Reportedly Secured StarCraft And Overwatch IP Rights

It looks like some of Blizzard’s biggest franchises might be getting new entries, but not from Blizzard.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Blizzard had been reviewing pitches for a new StarCraft game from a number of major Korean publishers since late last year, including Netmarble, Krafton, NCSoft, and Nexon.

Now, according to Korean news outlet MTN, it sounds like Nexon, best known lately in the west for developing The Finals and publishing The First Berserker: Khazan, has won the bid. It includes not just development rights for a new StarCraft game, but also Korean and Japanese distribution rights to a mobile Overwatch game as a package deal.

The Overwatch project is being referred to internally as “Overwatch 3”, and MTN states that the game is known to be a MOBA rather than a hero shooter.

The Next StarCraft Game?

Zerg rushing by opponents – StarCraft 2 Why Is It Challenging

While we know their Overwatch project is set to be a MOBA, the StarCraft project is more up in the air.

The deal reportedly doesn’t limit the game’s genre, and while the classic StarCraft RTS games have historically been extremely popular among competitive gamers in Korea, Nexon has an incredibly varied catalog.

That being said, last year, there were reports that Blizzard was developing another StarCraft shooter, with job openings suggesting an open-world FPS.

Promotional shot from The First Descendant of characters standing on a fallen statue head.

The First Descendant Fell “Below Expectations” But Nexon Revenue Still Up Year-On-Year

Nexon has mentioned The First Descendant has fallen “below expectations” but its Season 2 update improved player retention.

The StarCraft series has a famously rocky history with the shooter genre, most notably with the ill-fated StarCraft: Ghost, but maybe it’s time for another developer to take a shot at it and see if they can get it past the finish line.

While Nexon gets to developing the next Overwatch and StarCraft, Blizzard has been hard at work on new content for Diablo 4, having just released their 2025 roadmap, although not all has been going smoothly in that department either, with criticism directed at that roadmap, as well as the delay of the game’s Season 8.

For now, all we can do is wait and see what Nexon has in the works, but maybe a new developer is what was needed to breathe new life into the StarCraft series after it’s been largely dormant for so long; the last release was StarCraft: Remastered in 2017, and it hasn’t gotten a fully new game since 2015 with StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void.