Because they’re cunts.
Seriously though, it seems they’ve had a lot of trouble producing it.
“Reports indicate that most of the people responsible for the development of the original StarCraft have left the company[citation needed], and the repeated setbacks and delays for release — it was to have been released in 2003 — have prompted many to question whether the game will be worth the wait. Most StarCraft fans seem to be pushing for the cancellation of StarCraft: Ghost in favor of a StarCraft II. Blizzard is unwilling to create another StarCraft RTS at present; however they “...fully intend to revisit the world of StarCraft on PC at some point in the future” [3].
Release of the game has been postponed six times already, although this is not entirely unusual with Blizzard Entertainment games. Game development started in mid-2001, with a release date of the 2002-2003 winter. During the summer of 2002, the entire Nihilistic Software development team, the original developer of the game, quit en masse after an internal power struggle with Blizzard Entertainment. At the time, Slashdot and Penny Arcade reported that the team had already completed more than 85% of the game engine and 40% of all level design.
Following the resignation, Blizzard pushed back the release date of the game to January of 2003, only to push it back to “early summer 2003” in October of 2002. Blizzard went out on the market to look for a new development team, while reassuring their customers that there was nothing to worry about, that Nihilistic Software had merely finished the job they were hired for, that there were no power struggles inside the company and that the game would be delivered on time.
By Christmas 2003, they had found their new development team, but they pushed the date even further backwards to “second quarter of 2004”.
The game was announced at E3 2005 (and later the date was pushed to September 2005), and the web page was updated for the first time in a year. Blizzard Entertainment also acquired Swingin’ Ape Studios as part of a console-dominating strategy. These announcements seemed to have improved fan opinion of the game, but pushed the release date even further back to 2006.
In late March 2006, Blizzard Entertainment announced that the game has been “indefinitely postponed” for the PS2 and Xbox.
Although no further word has come on Ghost’s status, in November 2006, a new Blizzard novel, StarCraft Ghost: Nova [3], written by Keith R. A. DeCandido, was quietly published. This has led to speculation that Blizzard is taking the same route with StarCraft: Ghost that was taken with Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, which was cancelled in 1998, only to have its story released as a novel, Warcraft: Lord of the Clans, written by Christie Golden.”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft:_Ghost
