The rise of third world countries and the lack of a clearly-defined global pecking order also contribute to a volatile international environment. In the StarCraft storyline, Earth faces a Malthusian catastrophe by the 23rd century with a population of 23 billion. The long-waited sequel, StarCraft II, was officially announced in South Korea in 2007 and released as trilogy.
Blizzard quickly capitalized on StarCraft's immense popularity by releasing the Brood War expansion pack a year later.
Its replay value was considered phenomenal due to its support of multi-player mode through LAN and, which facilitated competitive play and laid the ground for the prominent rise of professional gaming in South Korea. StarCraft's gameplay is typical of the RTS style established since the 90s, involving resource gathering, unit production, fog of war, and management of supply quota. The storyline is unveiled chronologically in single-player campaigns, each played with a different race. The main story is set around 2500 AD in a distant part of the Milky Way Galaxy, when the Terrans, who are descendants of the exiled prisoners from Earth, come in conflict with the insect-like Zerg and the highly-evolved Protoss. The game was the first to feature three uniquely different playable races, the interplay of which posed a very complex balancing act with such great depth and variation in strategy that made it one of the best-selling games for the PC, with more than 11 million copies sold as of 2009. StarCraft is a military science fiction real-time strategy (RTS) game released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1998.