14 DAY TRIAL // Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is set to launch tomorrow and a lot of people are wondering whether the new game set in the Blizzard created universe will manage to be as successful as its predecessor. And the launch is one occasion for video games to break into the mainstream media, with the Wall Street Journal, a well respected publication focusing on business news, publishing a claim that development for Starcraft II might have cost Activision Blizzard no less than 100 million dollars. The newspaper has offered a correction for the figure since the initial publication but Blizzard is apparently interested in squashing any chance that the figure is picked up as fact by the video games world.
A statement that the developers sent out says that, “Blizzard Entertainment has never disclosed the development cost of StarCraft II, and for competitive reasons, we will not do so”. The Wall Street Journal is now saying that the 100 million dollars figure is linked with World of Warcraft, the MMO that Blizzard has created and the current leader in the subscription based market for online games.
The first Starcraft was launched ten years ago and it's very possible that Blizzard began working on a sequel as soon as the BroodWar expansion was out. The process probably began with a small team that put together the core concepts and decided what will be kept from the original and which elements would benefit from some innovation.
Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is just the first chapter of the sequel. The game is set to arrive exclusively on the PC and will tell the story of Jim Raynor, the quintessential Terran hero of the first game, showing how he and a small band of brothers navigates the dangerous galaxy and how he again becomes involved with some old friends and old enemies. Two other games are planned, focusing on the Zerg and the Protoss.