The DEATH of RTS Games...What Killed The Genre?
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- Опубліковано 10 кві 2022
- The real-time strategy (RTS) genre broke out in the mid 1990s and dominate sales charts for the latter half of the decade. Fast forward today, and you can count the number of new RTS games released each year on one hand. What happened?
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What killed RTS? Esports killed RTS, Pro players killed RTS. They were so pre occupied with making competitive games that they forgot to make good games, and fun to play games.
I don't exactly have evidence to really back this up, but I think a similar phenomenon to what happened to the horror genre happened to the RTS genre. It never actually became unpopular, but there just seems have been a collective arbitrary decision by many companies that the genre was not popular and no one was interested anymore. Despite the fact that there was a huge drought of RTS games post 2006, when one of them did manage to show up they usually did relatively well commercially. Starcraft 2, Dawn of War 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire come to mind. SoaSE is an even more impressive example considering it's a brand new IP from a studio that was not exactly well known in 2008 in a genre that was supposedly extremely dead and unmarketable. Much like the horror genre in the last few years, there's been a massive resurgence of RTS games in the same time span, with many of them being successful. I don't think the genre actually died naturally like history seems to claim, developers just sort of gave up while a huge audience was still there.
RTS requires a lot of commitment from players because of its intense competitive nature. That's why most players stick with the first RTS they really get into, and aren't as interested in switching fully to a new game they have to relearn. More casual RTS games have a better chance of becoming successful today. Northgard is a great example of that.
My problem with them was always being overwhelmed with the intensity of everything to manage. I liked the base-building more than the fighting.
targeting the smaller super hardcore and not casuals, focusing too much on PVP and not a long excellent campaign, no community based creation
That pretty much sums it up!
sounds like what happened to arena shooters
Agreed
Still fighting games succeed exactly for that reason. Still I think Blizzard should have made a "fun" Starcraft 2 instead of for "pro players".
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty was the breakthrough of the rts genre for Westwood studio. All rts followed that model after that.
See how much apm a pro starcraft player has and U realise why RTS died, it's just too hard for a casual player to play at even a decent level just to have casually fun. To much multi tasking where now days casual gamers want something alot easier to play.
There should be more focus on single player imo, I don't play multiplayer RTS for that very reason (and because most of them are so old the people that are still playing them are godly good and I'd never have any chance of catching up lol)
That is why there are other rts games, Even for me a starcraft is too fast, and c&c is the perfect phase for me, so looking forward to Tempest Rising, and then we have Even slower paced rts games
RTS games require a lot of brainpower, patience, planning, hand and eye coordination...
most people that play games these days are more interested in instant gratification...
Yes. Everyone is dumb. Me smart. Me have attention span. Me play game that require brain. Other gamer, he stupid. He not have it.
It's one thing to be self-important and it's another entirely to be retreading literal grognard cope. There is absolutely a market for strategic wargames. I've seen it. The audience is not becoming stupider. If nothing else you and the rest of the senile nursery home patients can still find dozens of online communities for your favorite games from when you were a young lad (The Neolithic Period) that have kept up the old school LAN/PBEM spirit alive.
At least it's easier to make than an MMORPG.
Yep.
Next video: The resurrection of RTS games 🙂
Just want to say each topic is formatted and written nicely, you present well, your editing is good. I'm certain over time you'll have a much larger audience if you upload consistently so keep it up.
Thanks for the encouragement Timo!
The appeal of rts for me is story campaign, i even keep trying playing losing battle over and over again until i win to know what happened next... nowadays rts story campaign no longer engaging to me, so i move on to grand strategy n make my own story...
Yeah, that's where Starcraft 1 & Brood War truly shined.
The Warcraft 3 + Frozen throne campaign will always be my favorite. It's one of the few games that kept my butt in the seat without noticing it that I played through the night till sunrise. Excellent cinematic, engaging cast of characters, even the faction music was made for the campaigns(that is played in skirmish mode). The difficulty wasn't also bogged down trash.
@@myconpodship I'd add C&C to this as well
I don't agree with the overflood argument, because then MOBA, MMORPG and FPS would be beyond dead by now. But I agree with the offshoots. If you look at LoL or Dota, you really need no effort to compete in these games. Whereas Starcraft was so insanely competitive that millions dropped every year unable to keep pace with the elite. Difficulty is thus the primary reason why RTS is dead. Battle Royales, FPSs or MOBAs are just no-brainers, and that's their key to success.
I think part of it is that game devs and publishers suddenly gave up on single-player games.
My 2 cents says that it's because the big names of the genres ain't around anymore. Back in the day when there were many of them, the ones that were considered the best and most important were C&C, Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires and probably Company of Heroes, these were the ones that were carrying the genre. Since Warcraft, Starcraft and C&C are sleeping now and the more recent entries in AOE and COH failed to impress, there ain't no other franchise to keep the genre afloat.
New big names could emerge if the genre was still back.
@@raskolnikov6443 or maybe if something like Starcraft 3 were to happen, if one can still trust Blizzard to deliver. Fighting games for example were in the same situation in the 2000's. They were becoming irrelevant until Street Fighter 4 appeared.
Good analysis! There are some points in there that I honestly never really have heard mentioned so far.
Personally I find that whenever I give RTS' a try nowadays I usually lose interest in their campaigns quickly and instead turn to skirmish mode. Not much changed from 20 years ago to be honest. Most of them are simply not very engaging and get relatively difficult quickly, but often without having particularly interesting scenarios to offer. Oftentimes skirmish mode provides more of an open-ended possibility to simply play without being forced to solve particular situations that are difficult to parse at first. It's especially bad when special rules that have nothing to do with the core game design are applied to campaign missions.
However, one thing that is usually lacking with skirmish mode is the lack of systems that help with long-term motivation. Like a dynamic map to conquer for instance or detailed score-keeping and information about how you did on a game. In general a lot of games seem to be scared of simply doing away with classical story campaigns or central stories, even though they often aren't really all that well constructed or written. Even RPGs would often be better if they viewed their main story more as one component instead of the thing that inevitably will end up strongly influencing how the game has to work overall.
There are some strategy games that do include the dynamic/Risk style map aspect, Dawn of War I's Soulstorm and Dark Crusade expansions come to mind. COH2 had Ardennes Assault with a non-linear campaign and COH3 is going to have a strategic map as well. The Total War series has always had a dynamic campaign/map as a big aspect as well. And I believe the Command & Conquer 3 Kane's Wrath expansion also had a Risk style map game mode. Rise of Nations had a Risk style map/campaign mode as well.
Age of Empires 2 is doing better than ever, 24 years after it was released, with new content, a great e-sports community and even a successful console launch, so there's still a demand out there 😊
The "novelty" factor is irrelevant, otherwise plenty of other derivative genres such as FPS games would be dead as well. A big factor as to why RTS games died out that the video failed to touch on was the death of PC exclusives in general. With consoles becoming more powerful and moving to the x86 architecture combined with the increased costs in game development it's simply no longer financially attractive to make PC exclusives anymore. Efforts to port the RTS genre to console (i.e. Halo Wars) have been mixed at best, forcing them to remain exclusive to the PC platform. Only the most profitable of genres, MOBAs and MMOs names, have survived this massive market shift. Flight sims are another pc exclusive genre that were hugely impacted much the same way. Microsoft Flight Simulator series only survived because it's backed by a behemoth like Microsoft.
The novelty wearing off is probably more important than we realize. How do you continue to innovate RTS and still capture a sufficient audience with so many partly overlapping genres? Besides the niches you mention (i.e. casuals to moving TD, noncasuals to MOBAs), I wonder if a part of the audience was lost to 4X and other turn-based strategy games, as well as games focused on building (e.g. Anno and Tropico series).
- Semi 'intelligent' units like in Dark Reign; you could decide at deployment if an unit would fall back at 50 or 25% health (or fight to the death for imperial troops).
Ideally, you should be able to point at the map and your units would try on their own to position themselves in defensive position, not stand there in the open.
- Some form of uncertainty; like a sudden rain ruining my cossak gunline.
- Get rid of box selection for a more intuitive handling; select an unit and draw a path, it will try to follow it.
Draw a circle around your units to select them, then draw a line, they will form a frontline. Draw a wedge, they will try to punch through.
Select some units from behind your line and draw a long arrow curving around the enemy, they will try to flank. Or punch through and encircle.
- A bigger focus on single player campaign, if only to experience different scenarios from 1v1; like having to defend with an army geared for offense.
- Some 'unbalanced' multiplayer; 1v3 where the solo player has strategic/positional advantages.
Good video and points. I have more to add. A huge problem was EA, (Electronic Arts). They bought a lot of the incredible 90s companies and retired the star people. So a huge number of great people were picked out of the industry, often forever. It matters a lot because if you look at what Westwood could make with Tiberian Sun, it was a lot more interesting and with more new ideas than probably any RTS that came later. It had deformable terrain, stealth units, subterranean units, wall of fire!, lots of different ways to attack, independent faction units, environmental damage, interesting maps that interact with radar, etc. And more. Amazing company. But they and many others got bought and retired by EA. The next C&C games were less technical than that one. Most of those things that impressed me were no longer in the game. I still had a lot of fun with the later games but that innovative drive was damaged.
And then they did C&C4 which was like a different type of game completely and half the fans hated it. That destroyed C&C for good. I know Supreme Commander went through a similar journey too, innovation at first then got bought by Square Enix who made a simpler 'streamlined' version which enraged half the already limited fanbase. They were two of the biggest and both of those series were driven in the ground. The genre died out but it was not entirely natural causes.
Also I think playing it on a gamepad must be horrible compared to playing with a mouse. So making an RTS was hugely limiting the audience to just PC players more or less. Making a Tower Defence game gives them a billion potential customers on their phones and tablets so it's a no brainer. Also the Actions Per Minute race is no fun for most people. I wanted players to have good ideas for base design, clever original unit compositions or something, and clever attacks to be able to win. Instead it's mostly just the one who clicks the perfect routine faster than everyone else. I think RTSs needed to evolve past that. MOBAs solved that problem but it never got brought back to RTS.
Also there's a big problem with the CPU demand from most of the RTSs. Each unit and sometimes each projectile was constantly being calculated so it's a big problem. Huge slowdown in big battles, even on top end PCs. Also the maps all seem so tiny now. They seemed ok at the time but after playing games with procedurally generated landscape that grows forever as you explore... it's hard to go back to an RTS with those tiny little sandbox maps.
RTS can't rake billions of dollars as it's pretty niche genre nowadays. You can't milk it too much with in-game purchases. If you want to have a competitive multiplayer you can't allow fragmentation of the player base with different DLCs.
The amount of money one can expect from a good RTS (not necessarily SC caliber but something on AOE or C&C level ) title over lifetime is 300 million at best (3 million copies x60 each and maybe two expansions at 20 each) + Compare it to FIFA, Candy Crush, cheap mobile games and it's paltry. Other monetisation like cosmetics also are not good, they are either uninteresting or might ruin multiplayer.
Also, those things are usually moddable but the publisher can't profit from that either (and many popular mods will probably be MOBA mods, i know MOBA like mod is easily possible in starcraft 2, BFME 2 , C&C 3 and WC 3 reforged and BFME would have spawned MOBAs if WC 3 hadn't do it already)
Yes, money. There are also less players since it requires more skill.
I wonder if there are people like me out there that never really moved on to other genres, as I get dizzy as soon as play FPS
Me here, while I also branched out to think like FPS, RPG I still have time to boot up a Mission or two on Tiberium Wars, Starcraft, Generals. Mostly because the modding community have began picking up the slack and new mods are coming off the assembly line.
1. Much more money potential in other genres, so that's where money and talent go.
2. The great companies that produced the great titles either were bought up by large companies that destroyed the intellectual properies (like Westeood) or they just declined before being bought (Blizzard).
3. The alure of the free to play (ie, pay to win) model.
This is just depressing. By the sounds of it; Westwood studios got it so right the first few times around that there was practically no room for any evolution apart from splintering the genre into several (which is what happened in the end) the genre came, it went 3D, and then it was all over for the most part...
I remember way back then, when StarCraft would be referenced in many games and web series, it would consistently show up in top games lists in magazines and whatnot, but now the sheer amount of peers I see that don’t even know what StarCraft is staggering. It just fell off the face of the earth…
I think the micromanagement killed the RTS. At first you would fight bad ai with constant movement and management. The genre never really escaped that issue 100% in my opinion. There's nothing more annoying then finding a unit doing nothing after you set a command for it over and over. The button interfaces stopped getting refined after a while too. It slowly was replaced by hotkeys which as you mentioned not all of us really care to learn. Also, I don't like the spastic screen jumping to micromanage everything. For me if I put all that time into managing my economy, my payoff is watching the fruits of my labor. I like watching my battles play out in one glorious fight. Everyone else I know agrees with that sentiment. It makes playing online hard as well because the other method is superior.
Damn, you left this up here for 5 months and nobody replied? All just agreeing with you, me included. There is so much truth to everything you said, HOWEVER, strap in. I too sucked, but then I got good.... is what I wanted to say at first, I watched a few youtube shorts of how humanity is evolving backwards, I came running back to say. While getting good at a game should mean becoming better at a craft, yes this is me considering RTS a craft, no pun included.
It should not mean I need to have better genetics (Not pointing any fingers at any regions, some of ya'll built different I get that. I'm speaking more about genetics in the sense how I'm literally dyslexic and learn slower) Or, being the age I am today effecting my ability to game at a high level (needing to play while executing a lot of actions per minute, for anyone not following will be called APM moving forward) and have fun.
Not that I have the answer to it, just contributing to the conversation - found this topic interesting due to the difficulty, or maybe simplicity it may be to fix the issue.
Autobattlers come to mind, Mechabellum - but i think having direct control is much more valuable.
@@2SK3TCHY Sounds like you had some good late night thoughts on your mind with the second half of your response. I had a good case study recently which backed up what I had mentioned before. Group of 4 guys all playing AOE2 remastered. Tried playing online and I warned them playing online is a test of your deep knowledge of units and economy management... just got destroyed. If you have a 4v4 and 1 or 2 of your friends falls behind you're screwed. They almost never catch up either, another thing that plagues RTS. We played quite a few games on different maps, but even the best of us cannot stop 4 people while the others play catch up. One guy literally said the game sucks and left after I explained economy management hahaha. Now no one has any interest in playing at all. I think back to when it came out and we played thousands of games. It's ok though.
@@yoda4520 haha, im glad the first half didn't offend, I was trying to showcase that it's hard to play well, without a "learning-curve" hence the term get good came to mind.
RTS could be considered like playing an instrument, its a totally different language. While many other genres are much less complex and easier to more or less, plug&play
@@yoda4520 i think you explained both a new user and a veteran the frustration this gap in knowledge has on our genre.
@@2SK3TCHY Definitely explaining both sides of the coin. I've been playing for years and still can't keep up with people beyond a certain skill level. I don't really care to learn it though either. I bought Factorio and it just sits there cause i didn't feel like learning the economies. Too bad too it looks super fun.
Great new channel. Subscribed
Two words; EA and modernism.
EA was the single most biggest detriment to the entire genre, their obsessive purchase of every single indie company they could get and the purchase of Westwood specifically, resulted in a massive collapse of the genre. However there was some hope from companies like Relic or surviving indie devs to keep it alive. But this is where modernism came in. Instead of sticking to the core base of RTS games like Base building .. power, economy, unit production, defences, etc, efficient and speedy resource natural resource economies 'gathering' and visual spectacle and scope, they focused on trends instead (something EA did too) and tried to turn their RTS projects into pseudo moba projects or mobile games, completely and utterly destroying the uniqueness of the entire genre and turning into a money pit because they wanted to profit off of the mythical wider audience over the core fanbases.
Times do change. Before RTS, Adventure games were the games of the 80s to mid 90s. The king's quest series was ground-breaking for its time. However, they have gone the way of freeware. I really don't have time for the moon logic anymore. And I agree that RTS is daunting that people can be so good. I was huge into WC3, but less so in SC2. I could hold my own, but to quasi casually play was not plausible. And now today I just play LoL.
Demi-God mentioned but not HoN?!??!?!?! How does HoN not make it into the history of MOBAs?? 😔😔
My problem for why I haven't played RTS games lately is the computer operating faster than a human ever could and producing units almost instantly while the player is limited to operating under the rules that the computer violates thus resulting in quitting many games before they're over because I didn't want to lose to a "cheating" A.I.
You know what's the most frustrating thing? When an AI can win battles of attrition but they NEVER EVER know how to finish a game.
@@EmperorSigismund I would have to disagree because in the RTS games I've played the AI was actually competent enough to actually give me the defeat screen
@@armageddon_gamingbeyond all reason comes to mind as a game with highly proficient AI...
Play against the same AI four times and itll do four completely different strategies.. Reacting to what you do and what it sees.
tbh rts games are just way to complex for MOST people, i love starcraft broodwar more then any other game ever, but i admit getting into comp. starcraft broodwar is like learning a new langauge, and most people just want to shoot stuff for a few hours and then move on.
Great reasoning, i am new to pc gaming and one of the main reasons i bought a pc was to play steel division RTS game and other similar games, what made me notice this genre which i was not used to was playing rts on my iphone.
have you tried world in conflict? the game has the best RTS campaign out there and the graphics is still good for a game from 2007
@@bernholtz1 saw it in GOG but didn’t buy it because its too old, i’ll give a try, thanks for the recommendation.
Funny, FPS games are still going strong even after *59,395,673,900,242* of them are in existence. I think ADHD is the reason RTS games died. A vast drop in intelligence, learning ability, and attention spans.
Another reason is greedy companies (like EA) can't effectively release a millions DLC packs, and loot boxes with RTS games.
I partially agree, RTS definitely takes more attention and thinking. But I will also say that sometimes after a long day of work where I had to do a lot of thinking the last thing I want to do is think even more which is why I'll play a FPS rather than an RTS since I want to relax.
that doesn't make any sense. If there's a genre that promotes ADHD-like behaviour it's RTS
@@vash47 how so? It requires more attention than a lot of other genres do, you have to pay attention to your economy, unit production and composition, what the enemy is doing, defenses etc it's a lot to track
I think it all goes down to the Big Companies, the way they put funds to game development and the way they advertise the game. I mean just look at some game genres that aren't FPS but has a strong and loyal fanbase, games like Forza Horizon, like not everyone is interested in racing games but it got a lot of attention.
Games like, Final Fantasy, a long standing JRPG franchise that existed for many decades, but when there's a new trailer everyone is interested. Souls games, the most difficult game in the genre that everyone claims, but it got a lot of non-hardcore players interested.Again, is all due to how big companies manage their games, like, remember how many times FPS games and non-fps games like God Of War got like cool CGI trailers and so on? How i wished that RTS games got the same treatment for having cool CGI trailers like that.
The last big factor, is when big companies only hire a small team to develop the game, Battlefield & Call Of Duty can get 5-10 studios to help develop their game, but when comes to other genres, they don't bother to give support, which is kinda sad..
@@joeyoung9596 this is true, only strategy games that get that are Total War
Hey just a critique to improve the channel: the background music is so loud I can't hear you properly (2:20)
Monetization is the other big factor. No one has found a way to monetize RTS games in the way League or Dota 2 has, and that makes them much less attractive to the big name publishers that can still pull weight and make a splash. See that comment from a former Blizzard dev revealing that a single cosmetic mount in WoW made Activison more money than all of SC2 + its Expansions.
Before i watch the Video i would like to state my opinion on What killed RTS ?
-First of all i dont think the Genre is "Dead" because certainly there is a demand and to what did the deed i would argue that it was E-sport not that E-soorts are bad in fact i relished that Video games became accepted as Sport (although not yet by olympic comittee) but the demand from E-Sports is highly incompatible for what Casuals need or want from these Games ,Casuals are arguably the highest petcentage of Players in all genres what they want is -Fun ,-Length
, - a game easy to get into ,
E-sports focus primarily on the Length factor a game Match should take up about 15 minutes at best but what the Casuals (i count myself as one) want is a game that you can play for Hours if not Days in real time the games that get developed with E sports in mind are mostly too fast paced for the RTS Genre anything that could lengthen a games Duration gets cut out like resource economy , Hard base defenses and similar we can see that most of the truly cherished old RTS had these things :Command & Conquer , Age of Empires 1 & 2 , Dark Reign , Starcraft (a weird one because it is still Highly Relevant) , we can take one peticular game as an example to see where ESL focus Ruined the Game and the entire Franchise to Boot: Command and Conquer 4 it was Fast pace in all aspects and should have been a "good" ESL title but was simply a Affront to the people and what they wanted from that Franchise they wanted complex bases , huge Armies , lenghty battles and Resource Management
Never liked genre much but there were some with great atmosphere like: Dungeon Keeper, Original War, Fallout Tactics, Dune 2000, Majesty .. etc.
Great video!
Games like Earth 2160 and Warzone 2100 where you could design your own vehicles was somewhat the pinnacle of rts games for me.
I enjoyed those as well…I should do a video on them!
No basebuilding? No real RTS!
I hate rts with barely any macro, it's not an rts without macro!!! Yes I do love company of heroes it's fun and engaging but it's soooooo micro focus, resource control is dependent on you taking certain control points. Don't get me wrong I love COH but a rts with no micro doesn't sit well with me.
To everyone 2023 is the best year for rts games for a looong time, u get the commmand and conquer sucessor "Tempest Rising", and Blizzard rts stormgate, and company od heroes 3, then aoe 4 is better now than at release. These are not small indie games.
And beyond all reason an grand scale rts, simlar to Supreme commander and total annihilation
I think RTS is almost a victim of AI getting too good. Pathfinder and unit priorizationg is so reliable often all you need to do is get a big enough army with counters for everything they're likely to run into and send them to an enemy base and they'll do the rest knowing what units defenses and base structures to prioritize and attacking units they're each individually counter to. Whereas is the bad old days they'd get stuck, get in each other's way and to attack moved at your own risk because they rarely fought in any sort of logical pattern
Would be cool to add Stormgate to this video.
resourcing is boring that's why. my personal fav was Sid Meiers Gettysburg! and it's focus on battle strategy and moving units only.. I think a good line command with a competitive scene could bring back the genre. I'd love managing an army of Red Coats in battles against the French and pesky rebel Americans, each with their own unique style and Generals
Somehow my mind is set that basic reason is that they became to expensive and long term to make. And easy to fall in development hell. Last 2 most popular major franchise games starcraft 2 and C&C 3 was extremely expensive and long time to develop. even upcoming Homeworld 3 was delayed multiple times. Classic RTS I consider by scale, it is much cheaper and simpler to develop MOBA tower defence or so other split off. most later RTS went to micro management route that left just hardcore players or competive limited scale. Casual classic RTS fallen in sales and popularity. I agree that competition from smaller more focused RTS split large base of players. but another reason is that no new similar games come to market that could leave mark.
Big difference that I see from my beloved Classic RTS is new ones are more complicated, lacking scale. You could just start almost any Classic one and learn to play in few minutes and enjoy. Mastering is another story. New ones sometimes so much overloaded with systems that you need hours to get to the basic game loop, or even find some META. In same time gamers expectations and player base changed. But many Classic RTS still have strong dedicated player base( Starcraft , C&C series, Homeworld, Age of Empires, Warzone 2100, Even Sins of Solar Empire*... )
this aged bad with like 15-20 new rts coming out 2024 xD
Go try Cosmonarchy brood war. It's free. It's fun. It's paving the way for new RTS games
Because RTS doesn't translate to consoles well.
There... Moving on.
I disagree that MOBAs siphoned all of the top players, because they didnt. If anything, RTSes have more emphasis on personal skill, since MOBAs are so massively team-oriented, but they definitely make for a more interesting spectator sport for casual viewers (it "trims the fat" so to speak: the time spent building up, macroing, and preparing before getting to the action), and there's still a pretty high ceiling. It's more that there was a lot bigger of a pie to go around by comparison.
Looking at Starcraft 2, which was at it's peak when League of Legends started taking off, most of the top-tier and very successful pros were the ones who stayed, while it was the pros who were a rung or two down from that level who made the migration over to League of Legends (especially in Korea, which had a VERY oversaturated pro scene at the time). For the pros struggling below the top rung, pastures in League were green and both the need for teams (meaning higher player demand and less saturation) and the much bigger pool of sponsorship money (due to better viewership) made careers in it more viable for those struggling to break through or make ends meet in Starcraft. It was a pretty significant chunk of the competitive scene though that migrated over, and it never really recovered. The horrible late Wings of Liberty (when Brood Lord/Infestor was pretty much unbeatable without abusing the Mothership's Vortex) and Heart of the Swarm (when every other match was either an hour-long Swarm Host vs mass Raven trench war or an early Blink Stalker 2 base all-in) metas also didnt really help matters
I also dont think it's oversaturation of the genre that led to the current state of RTSes either. I think it's more to do with the fact that in addition to just lacking the same broad appeal as a lot of other genres, they're also one of the hardest types of games to monetize. If you try to paywall individual units and gameplay elements behind microtransactions, it's going to be DOA given the competitive nature of the genre and the need for players to be--more or less--on an even playing field (non-competitive sandbox strategy games like Paradox's games can get away with this kind of thing though). Most players dont care about skins since they wont be looking at the same unit constantly like they would in a MOBA, so the number of players who buy them is comparatively small (with an already much smaller playerbase to boot). And as said before, the e-sports sponsorship money potential is way smaller than it is for MOBAs. It pretty much leaves single-player campaign content and large expansions as the only viable path to monetization for RTSes, and the margins for those things are way smaller than what other genres make with their monetization. Microsoft is the only big publisher willing to fund and release RTS games, and that's because they have Game Pass.
C&C generals zero hour only good RTS game ever made.
Someone with amazingly high actions per minute will beat someone with vastly more game knowledge who cannot move their units quick enough. The genre favored the hyper focus on APM and micro and increasingly gave people more units, even though the genre was far slower back in the 90s and early 00s. It's a clumsy way of doing strategy after XCOM showed how brilliant and fair turn-based can be.
It's the lack of clear focus on top of utter imagination bankruptcy that kills most RTS at launch.
We have Vanilla Skirmish PvP oriented games *without* even the slightest trace of effort for proper server/matchmaker mechanics.
We have prepetual copycats of SC2 and C&C that are worse versions of their predecessors with the exception of a single gimmick like “Navy” (on 99% landlocked maps, making the existence of said navy entirely pointless), or “Air superiority” (against opponent that lacks AA and dosen't oppose any challenge or a threat whatsoever unless the A.I cheats so hard as if “cheating” was the very Olympic race).
We have StarCraft-esc economy on C&C red alert 3 resource valves (that are like 4 for the entire map) which don't give you even the slightest option on how to control your income rate or how to control your expansion.
The developers don't know what they want and are way too afraid to come up with something original, it's always the same bland, empty, souless, perfectly symmetrical skirmish maps with ramps time and time again with clunky units that often times don't even feel organic to play around with. I'd kill for some dynamic map/obstacles/terrain/weather effects/natural disasters that change the flow of the game or affect your units/the terrain itself in a Skirmish mode. Or Risk-like conquest mode where you don't have conventional economy at all, but Warhammer tabletop army composition that you need to spread and organise effectively.
Relic design of RTS is closest to it, but they have problems with managment of developing their last games... COH3 is like best meal served in worst possible way..., but service is getting better. Ah, why a designer of the DOW 1 had to die..., when his idea was great for arcade, but still somewhat cometive RTS. It just needed refinement..
Dawn of War 1 with expansions and AI mods is probably the best single player experience in RTS genre.
Oh and to add to Company of heroes 3...
They have asymmetrical maps, factions and some destruction mechanics of terrain and buildings. You can burn down the bushes and covers, destroy cover, build path blockers, build cover, destroy builds in two ways (path blocker ruins or flat terrain with cover) and whatever more. If only they had competent managment and more good hands in their dev team... Ah, I need to stop complain to much about them on, coz maybe game is in a bad state, updates are lacking and slow, but only they manage to do something like this.
You don't know much if you think RTS is dead, it's very quick to find a game in SC2, big tournaments, live coverage with commentary, thousands watching every day. It was never meant for low effort gamers, most people quit when it's too difficult, a game full of dedicated players is alive.
Bring it back I say.
what is this Starcraft 1 MOBA?
Aeon of Strife
@@filozof90 Thank you.
DORF RTS is being made. The situation honestly isn't this bad. It's actually downright laughable to imply ANY genre is dead except the most critically niche ones, endangered by their sheer specificity.
Like if you told me save for Dishonored immersive sims were gone I'd kinda have to agree with you.
I like Starcraft as much as the next guy but I'm not deluding myself into thinking just cause RTS is going through a mainstream drought that the entire field is fallow lmao. There's really nothing to worry about.
"overcrowded" as opposed to the amount of today's RTS games right? lol come on man!
I think main reason they died is that free to play took over the market, people no longer wanted to pay box prices to try games incase didn't like it, and so numbers remained low and thus people don't buy dead games. If rts wants revived it needs to somehow make a free to play version that doesnt become pay to win, but attracts both those playing for free and those willing to pay for things like cosmetics etc. I think the free to play market effected the rts industry itself. Game companys stopped making rts because free to play game designs of other genes were more profitable that the main reason it died, no new good rts games, now it in situation people dont want to pay box prices for uncertain genes.
"it didnt die", algorithm push this channel more, ktksbye
Tycoons have followed similar path.
For me, Starcraft killed the genre, especially because of the competitive scene. All the companies wanted to get on the trend and designed the games more to be competitive than a traditional game with a campaign and so on. And it is more than known that competitive is a very small niche and difficult to master for most players. And it was thanks to the success of Starcraft that EA killed C&C by trying to make it one... when Dune and C&C had been the basic pillars of the genre. And Warcraft was overshadowed by and forgotten... thanks to whom? to damn Starcraft
I think what really killed the genre was the change in focus and gameplay demand
What I mean by focus is that a lot of modern RTS games kinda feel ashamed of what they're supposed to be. Like if you look at SC2's campaign level design, especially after wings of liberty, each level has at most 1 expansion that's so optional it might as well not even be there, and the levels are all basically tiny arenas where you capture/collect/destroy x amount of objectives. They basically tried to MOBA-fy the game, but that's not why we like RTS games.
Then gameplay demands. Modern RTS games really put big focus on competitive game modes, and to better facilitate that experience, they put a lot of work into smoothing out the games systems, like pathing, resource collection, etc. The problem with this is twofold; 1) A lot of people, I'd say even a majority, don't want to play competitively, atleast not from when they first play the game, and 2) the simplification of these systems is really not great for inter-player balance. The clunkiness of older RTS games actually makes the game more fair for people of less skill because it really smoothes out obvious differences in skill. Like in SC2, it's extremely obvious when someone is more or less skilled than you because of army size, composition, and base count. If you can't match or exceed your opponent, you are guaranteed to lose. But if you compare to scbw, it's not quite as drastic, because the bigger you get, the more the game's systems hold you back, allowing for more David vs Goliath scenarios. You're opponent may come rolling in with 3 control groups of units, but you may be at a bit of an advantage, or atleast less screwed if you have just 12 units, because it's significant easier to control 12 individual units, than 3 groups of 12. Modern RTS doesn't understand this very well, so if the player wishes to do well, a lot more is required of them, physically and mentally, so a lot of players are pushed away because they just don't have the time or willingness to exert themselves that way.
Toxic community of C&C fans destroyed the RTS genre because they are not willing to accept any kind of different concept. Take for a example Act of Agression. Everyone was bashing tge game because it had different types of resources and players were crying hiw hard it is. Later on they nerfed the game with Reebot Edition by removing all 3 types into 1, basicly turning the game into copy/paste C&C and Red Alert because players are incompetent and dont want to put a effort to the new concept. Most developers gave up on RTS's because the community is filled with everlasting ex Westwood fanboys who badicly want the same thing over and over again but with modern graphics.
its dead because they have "square map"
No one is bringing up money? So much more money can be made by other genres. Selling all the skins and other nonsense. Charging for new content releases every month. Online subscriptions. RTS makes it very difficult to achieve the same levels of money as non-RTS
Total War series is a far superior format for RTS gamers with historical interest. MOBA is far superior for those interested in real time combat. And yes, micromanagement kills RTS games for people like me who suck at the APM department.
Cant we just agree that cnc 4 killed RTS?
DISAG-FREAKING-REE, and speak for yourself
I must ingrain to you the names Planetary Annihilation: Titans, Zero-K, Iron Harvest 1920, Five Nations, Ancestors Legacy, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, CrossFire: Legion
@@royasturias1784 You forgot to mention Beyond all Reason.
@@royasturias1784 Iron Harvest sucked though. Terrible homage to an incredible setting that's been carefully crafted over a multitude of media.
Korean tier proficiency required to compete in multiplayer killed it. Nobody wants to do 6 gorillion APM with 57 hotkeys to be on level playing field. Not enough effort in single player campaigns too.
RTS games are garbage because relatively few people want to play a multiplayer game that takes time to set up and everyone just plays to win. There is nothing fun about someone spending more time than you to maximize their efficiency just to punish you with an early game rush. New players get turned away by the cost of skill - the time it takes to "git gud" - knowing the only reason you didn't survive is because someone clicked a bunch of buttons faster than you and determined what the most efficient build order is. Any game you have to study to be good at just feels like work, and I don't have the time or patience to do that shit, especially when it's for games that are 20 years old, like Starcraft, and most people have been grinding it for years. Age of Empires 2 is a standout because at least it has an option to prevent an early game loss in custom games, but forget about playing any normal matchmaking games because it doesn't do that.
I mean honestly you’re not wrong…I do like AOE2 a ton but getting good enough to throw my hat into the multiplayer scene? It’s intimidating.
90% of gamers are far away from top lvl players, so you should be able to find someone with similar lvl to play if player base is big enough and you can learn basics to manage stuff. Anyway, there is always a way for custom games, coop, team games and soo on.
nice
MOBA kills RTS :)
RTS dead? what are you talking about? I have 1500 hours of coh2 and 1000k on age 2 DE, I waiting for homeworld 3 and tempest rising.
RTS is dead only on your head and moba players.
Mona’s ruined the genire
Rts died because it devolved into who can click hotkeys the fastest lol
Who gets to their broken win condition build the fastest.
why you don't speak about paradox rts game(heats of iron 4 ...)?
Noobs
Rts is just so tedious to play. Turn based is more relaxing and actually encourages true strategy. With rts it's all build orders and quitting the game in frustration when you lose to someone 100x better
I dont want to know the history of RTS games. Your Content is misleading