A small bit of disappointment came from Activision today after they confirmed that StarCraft II will not be released on its original schedule. Rather than coming out in the second half of this year, the game has been pushed back to the first half of 2010. Though disappointing to eager fans, the delay is not surprising. Not only had Blizzard put themselves up against a wall with a tight time window for the beta, it also claimed numerous times before that if delays were necessary they would implement them.

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WoW makes more money, its obviously their first priority.

i think they fear that the rising economic depression will ruin their sales. which it probably would. if they think along these lines, starcraft 2 will most likely not be released within the next few years unless they decided to cut prices dramatically. lets see.

Well at least they're consistent. Every game blizzard has ever released has been delayed.

It is almost safe to say, that all reasons stated by blizzard officials are not authentic. For a company like blizzard/activision it is impossible to cause delays like that due to balancing work. Not to employ enough people to release the game this year would be totally insane, if there weren`t serious macroeconomic issues coming up.

by the way, what we see in contemporary political decision making regarding the economy is a textbook illustration of a total noobish macro management. the micro though is good. people are kept under control just fine.

I am Jack's total lack of surprise.

I didn't know Activision and Blizzard were together... Hope they don't fumble the ball with SC2.
Anyways, I'm not surprised with the delay Star Craft Ghost was delayed for a long time then canceled. I would be pissed if they did that with sc2 since it is a good possibility.

It's very very unlikely they would cancel Starcraft 2 seeing all the in game footage they have released. SC Ghost didn't get nearly as much exposure, only a few screen shots. It still was unfortunate that it got canceled.

LOL.

LMAO! Nice Fight Club reference!

I remember seeing gameplay footage of SC: Ghost in the trailer that came with Reign of Chaos.

BTW Blizzard, where the **** is Diablo 3?!

Since D3 was announced after SC2 I'd be guessing 2012 at the earliest. Probably 2013.

So much wrong with this post, I don't even know where to start... If SC2 was the ONLY game Blizzard was developing/testing/maintaining, your statements might be partially true. But you might want to take a look out the window at the economic state of the world. For a company to hire on a massive crew, push inflated and ridiculous development costs, and just throw extra people at a product just to get it done and put all their eggs in one basket, that would just be ignorant and negligent. The company has a staff, they are working on their titles, and if they run into problems, they push the release date back to make sure they put out a good product.

I, for one, am glad that Blizzard still holds quality above pushing out unfinished crap to be patched later, simply because someone assigned an arbitrary release date and they had better meet it or face the whiny cry-babies upset by a few months delay. I've played way too many games that were released too early, and lived through insufferable patches just to make the things PLAYABLE, let alone fun. PC games are a cut-throat market with minimal margins on the majority of the titles released, so if you have something like a reputation for quality and depth in your games, you stick with that and let the whiners just do what they do best.

I agree that it is smart to push the release date back until the game is finished, but there will always be things overlooked and in need of patching. As long as they don't assume the game is completely finished once it is released and keep up with the patching, I wouldn't mind an earlier release with a few bugs. Hell, I enjoy the crap out of Socom for PS3 and that game has all sorts of major bugs. Still a fun game, though.

stupid thing to say as they are made by completely diffrent teams . It's obvious the game would be delayed as every blizzard game is delayed , they are to be applauded as they put quality before rushing it out to make a quick buck.

It scares me how long the wait for D3 will be , so looking forward to that.

The economy goes straight down the tube. US bankruptcy might be just around the corner. You will see that in a few months. The US doesn't have any means of financing their huge deficit, nobody buys their treasury
bonds. To see the record deficit the US will produce this year visit cbo.gov. China is creating a bubble by stating their (export-dependent) economy is working well again, which is absolutely impossible. This serves the purpose of buying enough time to get rid of toxic us-assets. Both US-bankruptcy and the burst of the China bubble would lead to a global economic collapse. The only thing I'm curious about is what happens first.

As for the development costs, don't forget that workers want to be paid every month.

Starcraft 2 was never officially delayed. Obviously its not coming out this month though. This is just a rumor. Given that Blizzcon is around the corner and almost every games beta has been started after/during blizzcon the best guess would be that the beta will be out by the end of this month and that sc2 will be out 3-4 months after beta testing

I'm a big fan of multiplayer RTS, and seeing as how the last good RTS I can think of was Supreme Commander and the networking was horrid, I'm glad to see Blizzard straightening out the Battle.net issues before release.

Supreme Commander.... REALLY? Go kill yourself