Phil Spencer’s Tokyo Game Show update.
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.
Listing image by Microsoft