Blizzard: Not trying to “squeeze” money from StarCraft II

The announcement made by Blizzard about the StarCraft II distribution policy, that will see the title spread in three packages, one for each campaign, has raised a lot of polemic and reactions from users that felt it was likely to spend more than what they first intended to. Blizzard has quickly answered that it wasn’t their intention to try and “squeeze” money out of the game and that Activision had no influence in the strategy decision. Simply, they had already expressed their intentions of releasing two StarCraft II expansions, and the game structure remains the same as other Blizzard’s RTS’s: a main single-player campaign that allows players to have a little taste of each race. That’s how the first chapter of StarCraft worked, with 10 missions each for Terrans, Zerg and Protoss, and an expansion, Brood Wars, that added 8 more missions per race.

In StarCraft II the system will be a little changed, but not too far from the one used before: the first campaign will focus on Terrans, with 26/30 missions in which we will play as Jim Rainer. The first expansion will focus on the Zerg, with more 26/30 missions. The last expansion will be about the Protoss. It seems to feature, therefore, large campaigns for each product, but in order to give users a more epic experience, Blizzard decided to avoid putting all the three races together as done previously, but to focus more into the campaigns and stories for each race, one at a time.

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