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by saithir 1541 days ago
https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Patches

Yep, nothing to see here, no regular, ongoing support to a 20 year old game of the non-subscription variety at all. Warcraft 3 (from 2003) was similarly updated well into 2019.

Now, most regular games only get 2 or 3 years of attention.

> Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.

Oh no, how dare we despise things that anyone can see will not work as advertised.

5 comments

That's only regular if you ignore the 8 years of no updates between patch 1.16.1 in January 2009 to 1.18 in 2017. The same year they released Remastered to sell people. They've since also added cosmetics in skins and voice announcers: https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/family/starcraft-remastered

Similarly Warcraft 3 had a 5 year gap between 1.26b in 2011 and 1.27a in 2016, which was probably about when they started development for Reforged, announced in 2018.

Even ignoring the patches after the gaps, that's still 1998 to 2009 and 2003 to 2011, so both much larger time spans than the parent poster's claim that nobody ever does that.
StarCraft is a bit special with so much e-sports attention. I wouldn't necessary compare other games to it.
Starcraft is the exception rather than the rule. If you take a random sample of 20 year old games I'd wager that in the vast majority of samples none of them will have received updates in the last 15 years.
Adding to that list, most valve games (even half life 1 from 1996) still getting updates today, and indie game terraria released in 2011 which got big content updates over a decade.
If we are going to mention Terraria, we should also talk about Minecraft. I purchased it in 2009 and I'm still getting new content on a regular basis today. It's true that they have a subscription offering through Realms at this point, but it's entirely optional.
I'd love to see the % of games that got the same love as starcraft.