Beloved real-time strategy classics StarCraft and StarCraft II will soon be available in Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription for PC, the company announced during the Tokyo Game Show.
It’s already free to play both StarCraft and StarCraft II‘s multiplayer modes on PC. This move to Game Pass will make the equally excellent single-player campaigns available to anyone with a subscription, though. Game Pass will also offer all the expansions for both games.
The subscription will provide access to StarCraft Remastered, a revamped version of the original 1998 game that came out in 2017, as well as the StarCraft II Campaign Collection, which includes all 70-plus single-player missions from StarCraft II‘s Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, Legacy of the Void, and Nova Covert Ops.
The announcement was the lone bit of new information in a brief video by Xbox boss Phil Spencer. He appeared in the video wearing a StarCraft T-shirt, which might have gotten StarCraft fans’ hopes up that the franchise would be getting a new game for the first time in over a decade.
That didn’t happen, of course, but the games’ addition to Game Pass will likely expose them to many new players who may have been too young to play the influential strategy titles when they debuted in 1998 and 2010.
These aren’t the first Blizzard games to be added to Game Pass since Microsoft acquired Activision-Blizzard. First came Diablo IV, then Overwatch 2—the latter was free-to-play already by the time it came to Game Pass, but Microsoft included it in the Game Pass distribution platform and offered cosmetics and goodies to Game Pass subscribers.
The StarCraft games will launch for PC Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate subscribers on November 5.
Bethesda’s Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is the latest game from a Microsoft subsidiary that will make its way to the PlayStation 5. The game will hit Sony’s console in the spring of 2025, Microsoft announced yesterday, months after a planned December launch on Xbox Series S/X and Windows.
In an interview with YouTube channel Xbox On, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer expanded on that decision, implying that multiplatform releases for Microsoft gaming properties were important to the Xbox division’s bottom line. “We run a business,” he said, “It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the company, because we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing in what we’re able to go do.”
Phil Spencer’s comments come about three minutes into this interview.
Amid massive layoffs that have hit Xbox and othergaming companies in recent months, Spencer noted that there’s “a lot of pressure on the [game] industry” these days. “[The industry] has been growing for a long, long time and now people are looking for ways to grow,” he said. “And I think that us, as fans, as players of games, we just have to anticipate there’s going to be more change in how some of the traditional ways that games were built and distributed [ars] going to change… for all of us.”
“It’s just going to be a strategy that works for us”
Although Microsoft released four former Xbox exclusives on other platforms months ago, Spencer suggested that there hasn’t been any commensurate dip in total Xbox usage. “What I see when I look is our franchises are getting stronger; our Xbox console players are as high this year as they’ve ever been,” he said.
“So I look at it, and I say, ‘Okay, our player numbers are going up for the console platform, our franchises are as strong as they’ve ever been… So I look at this [as] ‘How can we make our games as strong as possible?'” our platform continues to grow both on console on PC and on cloud and I think it’s just going to be a strategy that works for us.”
A big-budget, big-name Bethesda release like Indiana Jones could act as more of an Xbox system seller than the four older, smaller games that Microsoft recently let go multiplatform. Then again, The Great Circle‘s multiple months of Xbox exclusivity—which include the 2024 holiday buying season—could still provide a bit of a relative advantage for Microsoft’s consoles.
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle‘s PS5 availability may come as a particular surprise to readers who remember Spencer saying in February that neither The Great Circle nor Starfield were a part of the company’s current multiplatform plans. But a careful parsing of Spencer’s words at the time shows that he only promised those titles were not among the four multiplatform titles they were announcing at that time.
Back then, Spencer said that those four multiplatform releases didn’t represent “a change to our fundamental exclusive strategy.” But he added that there was a desire to “use what some of the other platforms have right now to help grow our franchises” to help “the long-term health of Xbox.”
“[I have] a fundamental belief that over the next five or ten years… games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the game industry,” Spencer said in February.
Enlarge/ A demo of “Project Xcloud” streaming running on a mobile device, circa 2019.
Yesterday’s news that four unnamed Microsoft games are coming to “the other consoles” was a bit anticlimactic after weeks of now-refuted rumors about games like Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle going to the PlayStation 5. Yet even as those rumors die, Microsoft seems to be actively feeding new rumors regarding plans for some sort of portable gaming device.
In an interview with the Verge accompanying yesterday’s “multi-platform” business announcement, Microsoft Xbox CEO Phil Spencer was asked directly about any handheld hardware plans, including his recent penchant for liking some social media posts discussing handheld game consoles. While Spencer said he had “nothing to announce,” he talked up a lot of other handheld gaming hardware when talking about how Xbox could capture more “player hours.”
So, okay, what keeps people from playing certain hours? Well there’s some sleep, school, and kind of normal life, but some of it is just access. Do I have access to the games that I want to play right now? Obviously we’re kind of learning from what Nintendo has done over the years with Switch, they’ve been fantastic with that. So when I look at Steam Deck and the ROG and my Legion Go, I’m a big fan of that space.
Spencer went on to say that “real work” still needs to be done to get Windows to work better with controller input and on smaller 7- to 8-inch screens. That’s the kind of OS work we’d note would be very useful if Microsoft is planning to release a Windows-based gaming portable of its own (we’re assuming Microsoft would not want to ditch Windows in favor of SteamOS). “That’s a real design point that our platform team is working with Windows to make sure that the experience is even better,” he said.
Spencer gave even more direct hints along the same lines in an interview with Bloomberg, where he mentioned “early plans” for new consoles and promised, “We’re going to be able to do more innovative things in hardware, the more the game side of the business is having success.” He added that he “get[s] excited about different form factors that allow people to play in different places,” which sure sounds like the kind of thing a portable game console allows for.
Remember the “Xboy”?
Rumors of a Microsoft gaming portable are far from new, dating back to at least the Xbox 360 era and popping up periodically ever since. As recently as last year, insider reports suggested Microsoft had prototyped a “cloud-focused Xbox handheld” in the past, including work on a “lightweight” Xbox interface designed for handhelds.
At the moment, it’s hard to know whether a theoretical Xbox portable would be limited to streaming (either from an in-home Xbox console or the cloud), as those reports suggested. While a streaming-focused handheld could definitely be cheaper to produce, it would be necessarily limited by a smaller selection of games, the need for a reliable Internet connection, and the ever-present latency issues that streaming games have yet to shake (and/or the need to be on the same network as a local Xbox).
Enlarge/ Could Sony’s PlayStation Portal provide a roadmap for a similar “portable Xbox” design?
Sony
Regardless, some industry pundits have also recently taken to arguing for Microsoft to make a portable gaming move as well. Earlier this week, The Verge proclaimed that “it’s time for Microsoft to build an Xbox Steam Deck” (in a piece timed almost suspiciously closely to the site’s hint-filled Spencer interview). And Jez Corden at Windows Central argued earlier this month that an Xbox handheld “isn’t just likely… it’s absolutely necessary,” (in a piece that also received a like from Spencer on social media).
Then again, a Microsoft “Roadmap to 2030” document from May 2022 (revealed through leaked court documents during the Activision Blizzard merger case last year) listed a portable console as “not in scope for 1st party” as part of Microsoft’s plans at the time. And in 2020, Microsoft’s former head of Xbox, Robbie Bach, discussed three previous times in Xbox history where proposals for an “Xboy” portable were shot down because “we just didn’t have the bandwidth to do that.”
But Bach’s tenure at Xbox (which ended in 2010) was a very different era in the portable gaming market. Today, Valve’s Steam Deck and its imitators have proven there’s a space for more PC-like gaming handhelds that go beyond Nintendo’s longstanding iron grip on handheld gaming. Even Sony recently re-entered the portable gaming market with the PlayStation Portal, though that device being restricted to in-home streaming from a local PS5 puts it in a different class than many other gaming handhelds.
The new rumors also come at a very different time in Microsoft’s own hardware-making story. In 2010, the ill-fated Microsoft Zune was on the verge of ending its short market tenure. Today, Microsoft’s line of Surface laptop-tablets has spent over a decade successfully establishing its place in a competitive market. Maybe Microsoft will take some of those Surface lessons forward if it decides to enter the handheld gaming market for the first time.
