According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, a team at Blizzard was desperate to make another real-time strategy game, pitching Warcraft 4 and even a Call of Duty spin-off to Blizzard's executives (thanks, GamesRadar+). Blizzard ultimately wasn't interested.
Tim Morten joined Blizzard Entertainment to make real-time strategy games, a genre Blizzard helped define and used to be known for. Morten had played Warcraft 2 and Starcraft in his youth and was hired by Blizzard in 2014 to be a production director on Starcraft 2, eventually winding up as the game's lead producer.
Morten worked on Starcraft 2's final expansion, Legacy of the Void, and felt the team had learned a lot of valuable lessons about the RTS genre. The team was eager to take these lessons and create a new RTS, but priorities had shifted inside Blizzard. Commercially, each of Starcraft 2's expansions had performed worse than the last, and with Overwatch's loot boxes printing money, Blizzard's leadership had no desire to pursue a new RTS.
According to Schreier in his Reddit AMA, Morten and his team made several pitches to no avail. "Morten and his team tried for years to kick off a new RTS," Schreier...
