The DEATH of RTS Games...What Killed The Genre?

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?

Read Age of Empires IV and Real-Time Strategy Games' Rocky History on Wired:

[Senbatorii]

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.

[UndyingNephalim]

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.

[marzero]

targeting the smaller super hardcore and not casuals, focusing too much on PVP and not a long excellent campaign, no community based creation

[timarillo]

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.

[pyrophobia]

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...

[merdufer]

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.

[yoda]

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.

[metascrub]

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.

[Iseenoobpeoples]

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.

[QuantumNova]

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.

[TheEvilSeeds]

Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty was the breakthrough of the rts genre for Westwood studio. All rts followed that model after that.

[tomsawyer]

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.

[maelmoor]

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 😊

[burningsheep]

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.

[ImperialEarthEmpire]

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...

[Pulsed]

Next video: The resurrection of RTS games 🙂

[James-tkyl]

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.

[radicalcentrist]

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.

[adventofknowledge]

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.

[IchHassePasswoerter]

I think part of it is that game devs and publishers suddenly gave up on single-player games.