Chris Sigaty, StarCraft 2’s production director, told Eurogamer that Blizzard were still “actively working” on Blizzard All-Stars, and that their priority now was “to pull off a game with a different business model than StarCraft 2 [because] StarCraft 2 is a box. We intend to do something different with the business model in Blizzard All-Stars, something more closely resembling the other types of games in that genre, the MOBA-style games that are out there.”
Blizzard All-Stars is the company’s own take on the Dota-inspired MOBA genre and this very much suggests it will follow a similar business model to League of Legends and Dota 2, making it Blizzard’s first free-to-play title.
Further emphasising this, Sigaty added “I suspect you will not have to have StarCraft 2 to play.” Previously, there had been speculation that All-Stars might be released as part of Heart of the Swarm.
Details of the project, which was shown off at BlizzCon 2010 but was apparently rebooted since then, have been very thin on the ground. I certainly had to do a fair bit of digging to put together last year’s roundup of everything that we know about the game.
Thanks, of course, to Eurogamer for this, who soloed mid to grab the story, wearing nothing but a Hat of Games Journalism.