According to IGN PC, it's looking better on the StarCraft 2 front. However, it looks less promising for fans of the original game.

"The report also claims that Blizzard plans to shut down its original StarCraft servers in order to ensure the success of the sequel."

I'm not sure that you need to deactivate the old servers to ensure the success of SC2. You could put the word "Blizzard" and a $50 price tag on a couple million blocks of wood these days and they would still sell out if you left them in a computer store.

Still, I feel a bit bad for the old-school SC players if this is indeed going through. You can always get stuff going on the side, but it just gets harder and harder when official support is dropped. But StarCraft is getting on ten years, so you can't say that it hasn't been a good run.

They'd never do that. They've continued to support their upgraded version of the 1995-released Warcraft 2 even through the wake of Warcraft 3 and WoW's success. And WC2's fan base was only about one third of Starcraft's at its best.

I doubt that too. Even the - much more problematic due to all the hacking/duping attempts - Diablo II servers weren't turned off yet. Quite the contrary, they keep patching the server software to fix new exploits. Blizzard's customer service is a desaster and their silence concerning upcoming releases is legendary (as is their slowness), but these guys really support the stuff they made.

And before I forget it: not even the servers for the original Diablo have been shut down yet. They are still running and fully operational. Talk about dedication.

Still, StarCraft 2? I'll believe when I see it.

Well, Ghost is coming out anytime now... right? right?

Come to think of it, the only games Blizzard doesn't support are their early crappy titles no-one plays anyway.

As for silence, perhaps it's better to keep upcoming games under the wraps. CGW would have saved a lot of negative publicity if they'd done that with STALKER.

They did re-release "Lost Vikings" though. Ok, it's to make more money, but it's also keeping the franchise alive. They appeared in WoW as well, so they aren't entirely forgotten yet.

Totally agree. It ain't happening. Blizzard isn't stupid and they know where their fan base is. I can respect Blizzard because despite the problems in the games they continually patch and update even the oldest of their games. Look at SC, its over 10 years old and people are still monitoring it for exploits and updating it. They even still support WC2 and Diablo 1.

If anything, they would first drop the support for older games such as WC2 and Diablo. Dropping SC would just be stupid....or at least well against their principles.

Also, I don't see how they could need to shut down one game to support another. They've made a fortune off of WoW they could easily support a whole tier of new releases.

I just read on the battle.net forums that they are planning to adopt the World of Warcraft setup program for their old releases on both PC and Mac. Affected are Starcraft, Warcraft 3 and Diablo II. All these games work perfectly well on current systems even with the supplied installer (not on Mac tho, but they already offered new setup programs for download before).

In that context, why would they care for that if they'd going to shut down Starcraft? It ain't happening. There are companies who don't fix their 6 month old games - and there is one which cares for setup programs on 10 year old releases.

That's a very good point. 9 million players * $15/month? They could buy a whole country and rename it Azeroth if they wanted to. (Maybe that's exaggerating a little, but they're still earning a lot of money through WoW). And more to the point they've built up a reputation for supporting their games. Surely they wouldn't want to repudiate that.