Will we have StarCraft II by the end of the year?
Sure, if Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime is to believed. He just made the announcement to a gathering of Activision Blizzard investors and media, as part of the company's pre-E3 press conference.

While the Activision part of the event was understandably dominated by Guitar Hero, DJ Hero and Modern Warfare 2, Mike didn't really make any great announcements about what Blizzard are up to - except the hopeful release date for their next RTS.

"We're targeting an end of year release - this year - for StarCraft II . But as always, we won't release it until it meets our standards and the expectations of our players."

Mike took the time to confirm that gamers who pick up a boxed copy of StarCraft II from a bricks-and-mortar gaming store will be getting the full game - and they will be able to log onto Battle.net (which is being totally overhauled for the SC2 beta), and play for free, with no extra charges.

In a later Q&A session, Mike promised that the strategy surrounding Battle.net will help win over subscribers all by itself, bringing them back from pirate servers - but he was also asked about Blizzard's plans to monetise the Battle.net network. The answer came like it had been rehearsed: "I'm not ready to talk about that today." Hmm.

It shouldn't be surprising to hear that that things are going pretty well for the company - their 2008 revenue was three times that of 2005, despite that pesky global financial crisis dealie. For five of the past seven years in the US (and three of the last four in Europe), the best selling PC game of the year has been from Blizzard. Wrath of the Lich King sold enough copies in one day to become the best-selling PC game for the whole year. Also, at last count, World of Warcraft has more than 11.5 million subscribers - and that "by our calculations, that's about 10-11 million more than our nearest competitor."

More information, of course, will be revealed at BlizzCon 2009, to be held in Anaheim in August.