Computer and Videogames’ website is purportedly confirming what has just been an incessant rumor up to now: Vivendi game studio/World of Warcraft developer Blizzard Entertainment will announce an MMO spinoff of their wildly popular Starcraft franchise at the company’s May 19th Worldwide Invitational in South Korea.

I say “purportedly” because the CVG article only cites unnamed sources, and I don’t want to jump the gun; I’m checking with Blizzard’s PR department now, and will report what they say, if anything. Then again, Blizzard has been running help wanted ads for developers of an unnamed “Next-Gen MMO” on its site, these last few weeks, and Starcraft is the other jewel in the company’s IP crown.

Assuming the company does confirm, is a Starcraft MMO a good business move? For the Asian market, absolutely, but it’s hard to imagine it would reach anything like the global success of World of Warcraft.

So far, science fiction-themed MMOs based on well-known IP have performed poorly against expectation: Star Wars Galaxies only managed a few hundred thousand subscribers; Matrix Online didn’t even reach six figures. (My personal theory is that sci-fi just doesn’t work in an MMO, because it’s not fantastic or other-worldly enough to feel like a meaningful escape into an alternate reality. After all, what’s the appeal of pretending to be in a world of spacecraft, high-tech military hardware, and pervasive computer interfaces, when you’re already in one?)

Another challenge: Both Warcraft and Starcraft began as real-time strategy games, but it was easier for Blizzard to make the genre leap with the fantasy-themed Warcraft, already similar in appearance and gameplay to other fantasy MMOs. Without a large pre-existing audience for sci-fi MMOs, it’ll be a lot tougher to convert Starcraft into a multiplayer roleplaying game that’ll appeal to its RTS fanbase.

Except, of course, in South Korea, where 3.5 million of the 9 million units of Starcraft have sold. Given its population of 49 million, that means one in sixteen of the entire country has a copy; there’s even Korean television shows devoted to Starcraft gaming. Which is probably why Blizzard’s making the announcement there (if they are). I’d expect any Starcraft MMO to be developed for the Korean/Asian market first, and only after proving itself there, localized for Western consumers.

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Game industry expert David Cole of DFC Intelligence has been a guiding source for me for years, and he just revealed some astonishing numbers about the MMOG market:

“I can let you be the first person we tell that we forecast the worldwide MMOG market going from $2.2 billion in 2006 to $5.9 billion in 2012,” he e-mails me.

These figures are part of an upcoming DFC report, and they are bullish in the extreme. For proportion’s sake, bear in mind that the entire computer/videogame industry is currently a $7.4 billion business.

“In terms of overall growth,” Cole continues, “the market in both North America and Europe is expected to triple.” Furthermore, over $2.3 billion of that revenue is expected to come from advertising and digital distribution of virtual items/characters etc, not subscriptions.” This would be quite a reversal, for most Western MMOs still rely on a monthly subscription model.

The DFC forecast, it’s worth noting, is pinned to online games, with some ambiguity on how to count revenue from the numerous virtual worlds on the market or about to be launched; many are social hangouts or user-created collaborative spaces, and not games in the strict sense of having pre-defined goals, levels of success, and so on.

“Does MySpace count?” Cole asks rhetorically. “Every free site that has an avatar?” (Many online worlds are free to the user, and depend on external advertising deals for revenue.) DFC’s solution for virtual worlds, he goes on, was to only count user-to-company payments.

“If you can get them to pay a subscription fee or get them to buy items in a virtual world… for those consumers that starts to become a game.” With those services, he says, “[W]e would count the subscription and virtual item revenue, but not any ad revenue they generate.”

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