With BlizzCon just a week away, there’s new reason to believe that some kind of StarCraft news is on the way. Various visual elements on the official StarCraft website are now glitching out in a way that looks much more “hey fans, get excited” than “alert the engineering team that we’ve got a problem.”
The glitches were flagged on Bluesky by John Carson, and they specifically appear on the section of Blizzard’s website advertising 2017’s StarCraft Remastered, rather than StarCraft II. The glitches see certain images and text become briefly distorted, though to my eye, there is nothing specific to glean from them.
But this sudden marketing stunt feels noteworthy given that the StarCraft franchise has largely been dormant for years. 2026 has brought rumors that something is afoot: The publisher behind Arc Raiders was said to be working on a StarCraft shooter that would be revealed at BlizzCon. More recently, a report from The Chosun Daily claimed that Nexon was seeking the rights to develop a new RTS, possibly StarCraft III.
That anything is happening with StarCraft could come as welcome news to fans of the franchise. StarCraft II was released in three main components between 2010 and 2015, and other than the subsequent remaster of the original, no new games in the series have been released or even announced. As Blizzard’s focus shifted to maintaining WoW and Diablo, as well as developing Overwatch, it wasn’t terribly surprising to see its more niche real-time-strategy series fall by the wayside, but it was no less disappointing: The StarCraft games are among the best strategy games ever, and fans were already tortured through years of hoping the canceled StarCraft: Ghost spin-off would ever see the light of day.
StarCraft II did get a sizable update earlier this year, which might have been part of an effort to begin to revitalize interest in the franchise as Blizzard prepares to bring it back. Should that come solely in the form of the rumored shooter, that would come as a blow to those wanting to see Blizzard return to the strategy genre that it has otherwise abandoned (first with Warcraft, and then with StarCraft). Were that complemented by a new Nexon-developed RTS, it might soften the blow, though the lack of Blizzard’s direct influence might undercut the excitement such an announcement would otherwise produce, but beggars can’t be choosers, after all.
BlizzCon’s opening ceremony is set to take place on 10:30 AM PT / 1:30 PM ET on Saturday, September 12. If there’s life in the StarCraft franchise, it feels like a sure thing that we’ll see some sign of it there. If not, somebody call StarCraft’s webmaster.