A rumor-tastic post on GameFront quotes “an industry insider” who attended the recent press-only show of the single player campaign of the Starcraft 2 expansion pack, Heart of the Swarm. (Yes, the game is called SC2:HotS. Today’s lesson: always check the acronym before you register a multi-word title, kids.) The article has some tidbits about the SC2 expansion, but the part I found interesting was his bold predictions of a Starcraft MMO.

There will be a StarCraft MMO. No, it?s not Project Titan. As evidenced by its adoption of a subscription service for the Call of Duty franchise, Activision Blizzard is, and I quote my source, ?committed to enhancing shareholder value through residual monthly fees.? Given the popularity of the StarCraft universe, the immediate reaction to the World of StarCraft mod, and factoring in an aging World of Warcraft, Blizzard has been put into a position where an SC MMO would be too financially lucrative to pass up.

Nothing in the article reveals where this source gets his “information,” which makes this sound like pure speculation. We know Blizzard has another secret title underway (besides Titan), but they’ve said nothing about it and it wasn’t on that leaked product release schedule, so it must be years and years away. It might be an MMO; it might even be an early version of a Starcraft MMO, since it’s never safe to bet against Blizzard re-re-reusing one of their three established properties, but given the pace Blizzard creates games, your kids will probably enjoy it.

One small problem; who would make it? All of Blizzard’s MMO devs are making Titan or scrambling to get out another WoW expansion (with decent end game content this time) as damage control for the ill-received Cataclysm, and now they’re supposed to launch into full production on a third MMO title? Bobby’s eyes may twinkle at the thought of additional monthly fees, but they can’t create fifty-person MMO dev teams from thin air.