StarCraft sequel rumors are blazing after a report claims that South Korean-Japanese publisher Nexon is close to acquiring development rights for the sci-fi onslaught from IP holder Blizzard.

South Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo reports (according to machine translation) that, as of September 2, Nexon and Blizzard are on the knife’s edge of finalizing their deal, which would allow Nexon to make that StarCraft sequel people have been fretting over since 2025. At that time, it seemed that Nexon was in competition with fellow South Korean developers Krafton, Netmarble, and NCSoft before the Arc Raiders publisher bested them.

The Chosun Ilbo – through a translation by Twitter account KoreaXBOXnews – notes that StarCraft is still immensely popular in South Korea nearly 30 years after the original game’s release, and it consistently ranks among the top 10 games people swarm to PC cafes for.

Nexon apparently has to wait to make it official, but the studio has reportedly already started work on its hypothetical StarCraft sequel – which could very well be StarCraft 3, 16 years late. But no one knows that yet except Nexon, which hasn’t shared any details about its StarCraft plot throughout this year-long saga.

It at least seems that Nexon’s hypothetical StarCraft game is unrelated to Blizzard’s hypothetical StarCraft game. Blizzard decided to halt StarCraft 2 expansions in 2020, though the developer was fiddling with another entry in the StarCraft series as recently as 2024. So there is a world in which famished StarCraft fans are suddenly handed two new games like plates of bottomless breadsticks. Nexon just needs to wrap up its rumored deal with Blizzard, and Blizzard needs to figure out if it’s really as committed to keeping StarCraft alive as it occasionally pretends.

Nexon has at least seemed to make some progress with its take on StarCraft. It’s reportedly collaborating with StarCraft map modder Choi Jun-ho, who would lead the StarCraft sequel at Nexon’s subsidiary that made the free-to-play FPS Sudden Attack. StarCraft 3 sounds promising, if it exists.

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