Why did Real Time Strategy genre die out?

[PorkyThePaladin]

Yes, I know there is a gasp here and there, like Age of Empires IV or the recent re-release of Command & Conquer games, but it's such a minor genre today. Years ago, it was thriving, with major hits like Starcraft, Age of Empires 1/2, Age of Mythology, Warcraft 2/3, Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander, 2160 games, Cossacks, Spellforce, Stronghold, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Dawn of War, and many others.

There is a theory that MOBAs/DOTAs killed it, after the Warcraft 3 mod took off, targeting the same crowd, but I dunno if I buy that as the full explanation.

What I think happened was the genre never understood its true appeal and went into the wrong direction. Companies seemed to think that RTS games are primarily e-sports competitions (Starcraft, Warcraft, AoE), but this is exactly where RTSs were most vulnerable to DOTAs. First, DOTAs start with the action immediately, whereas RTS require some build up time, which becomes boring after n games. And in general, DOTAs capture the competitive aspects better, imo. Plus, with e-sports, there is only so much room for games, once you have your leader, say Starcraft, everyone competing is playing that, not much need for new games.

Another false path that RTSs went down was the story driven campaigns (whether in Starcraft, Company of Heroes, Warcraft, etc). If somebody really wants a narrative driven game, they will probably prefer an RPG anyway.

Where the real squandered potential of RTS games was, was the stuff in games like Stronghold or Dwarf Fotress, where you had complex supply chains, structures that interacted with each other and weren't just one-offs, and settlements/economies with a lot of deep, interesting aspects. No other genre can offer this, and I think in general people do love playing with little units, and building stuff, and defending it, so if RTS games could develop this side of the genre, there is no reason they couldn't have a great Renaissance.

 

[Ezekiel]

Because it's too fast and I can't defend my Age of Empire II kingdom while trying to keep it pretty as I did when I was a child, unless I play on boring easier difficulties.

 

[ind33d]

selling a game whose professional players are 100% Korean is RACIST

 

[luj1]

There is a theory that MOBAs/DOTAs killed it...

....

What I think happened was the genre never understood its true appeal and went into the wrong direction

This is the same thing

 

[sser]

Consoles briefly killed RTS's. That's really all there is to it. You saw a lot of them evolving to try and get 'playable' on a console and this harmed the genre as a whole. Consoles had a negative effect on a number of genres and even on mechanics within genres (see the devolution of the Rainbow Six games for an example). By now though I think most of them have healed up as gaming as an entertainment industry is huge enough to take anyone and everyone under its umbrella.

Also: Starcraft 1+Broodwar, Red Alert 2, and Homeworld all have better stories than most RPGs I've play.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Too simple to learn, too difficult to master. Mastery also requires a bugman fixation on efficiency and time at the cost of aesthetics and long-term planning. Pure utilitarianism.

Professional hopefuls went to mobas where the amount of micro is far less than the requisite for competitive RTS play, casuals went to grand strategy as they grew older, which offers superior system complexity and more importantly persistent maps/campaigns. RTS continually dropped the ball on the latter two points. Stronghold was absolutely a step in the right direction, still too simple but it was the early 2000s. The scope was still too small and the maps were microscopic. If anyone ever played multiplayer, you barely had the room for two players to squeeze in two castles. From each set of walls your archers would be within firing range of each other, it was pretty comical. Nothing was stopping Firefly from taking the concept and building on it, adding more and more depth and building types to the castle sim, but they never did. They've been content to release practically the same game as in Y2K over and over again.

Fast forward to the mid-late 2000s, take something like BFME II. EA went to the trouble to make huge campaign scenarios with maps that actually give the player room to breath, so you get to work building your perfect dwarven fortress incorporating the terrain into the design. You beat the hell out of your opponent. Later on you're attacked again in the same county, the awesome castle you built is fucking gone because no persistence. You promptly abandon the RTS genre and play nothing until CKII released. Sure you lose out on the set piece keep-storming and rides of the Rohirrim, but the complexity you gain more than makes up for it.

 

[Elttharion]

The Grim Dawn devs did an interview with Pcgamer and they talked about this a little bit since they are working on a RTS game. I dont know if they will publish the whole interview but there is this article and there are some pretty interesting points here:

The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO​

Real-time strategy is a "nerd genre," says the developer, and he's happy to make one on those terms.

Crate Entertainment has been working its way through some very 'PC gaming' game genres: First it made an action RPG, Grim Dawn, then it made town builder Farthest Frontier (which is scheduled to leave early access sometime this year), and now it's also working on a real-time strategy game. Unlike some of its contemporaries, however, Crate isn't trying to crack the code to making a mainstream RTS megahit: Real-time strategy is a "nerd genre," Crate Entertainment CEO Arthur Bruno joked in a recent interview with PC Gamer, and he accepts the limited audience that implies.

The idea that classic-style RTSes don't appeal to the biggest possible audience today is widely accepted as common knowledge; it's the reason game publishers have been somewhat RTS averse since the golden age of the '90s and 2000s. During our chat, Bruno recalled how his plans to make a new RTS game were met with groans during a meeting with a certain well-known holding company.

"Maybe two years ago, I had a meeting with Embracer Group, who were kind of feeling us out for an acquisition," said Bruno. "I honestly wasn't really interested, because I don't want to work for anybody else in any capacity, but it's often educational.

"So, I go to the meetings to see what there is to hear. And they asked what we were working on, and when I mentioned an RTS, people visibly groaned, like, 'Ah, why would you work on an RTS?' You know, they said, 'An RTS is like PC-only by nature, why would you work on a single platform game when you could have made something multiplatform and another genre?' And I'm thinking, well the fact that you don't want to make an RTS is exactly the reason why it's a great opportunity for us."

(Regarding the state of Embracer Group today, Bruno laughed and replied, "I think I dodged a bullet there.")

The biggest companies are leaving genre gaps for smaller developers like Crate Entertainment to fill, in other words. Bruno thinks that's because big publishers are hoping for lightning-in-a-bottle hits that return 10 times their investment—"When you're operating at that scale, you want to build something that has the potential to sell 30 million copies," he said—and he doesn't think the RTS genre is ever going to produce that kind of success. If it did, he's skeptical the game in question would really be an RTS as he defines it.

"I look at interviews now with people who are working on RTS games at these other companies, and a lot of them are trying to figure out how to make RTS more mainstream," said Bruno. "And to me, I just feel like RTS is never going to be that mainstream. I mean, sorry to say it, but as much as I love it, it's a nerd genre, there's only a limited portion of the population that is ever going to be interested in that kind of game unless you change it to such an extent that it's no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play."

Source

 

[Gerrard]

Because of Koreans.
And because it's not a fucking strategy game if dexterity is the most important attribute.

 

[luj1]

Because of Koreans

None expected the level of success Brood War had in Korea btw

 

[ind33d]

Too simple to learn, too difficult to master. Mastery also requires a bugman fixation on efficiency and time at the cost of aesthetics and long-term planning. Pure utilitarianism.

Professional hopefuls went to mobas where the amount of micro is far less than the requisite for competitive RTS play, casuals went to grand strategy as they grew older, which offers superior system complexity and more importantly persistent maps/campaigns. RTS continually dropped the ball on the latter two points. Stronghold was absolutely a step in the right direction, still too simple but it was the early 2000s. The scope was still too small and the maps were microscopic. If anyone ever played multiplayer, you barely had the room for two players to squeeze in two castles. From each set of walls your archers would be within firing range of each other, it was pretty comical. Nothing was stopping Firefly from taking the concept and building on it, adding more and more depth and building types to the castle sim, but they never did. They've been content to release practically the same game as in Y2K over and over again.

Fast forward to the mid-late 2000s, take something like BFME II. EA went to the trouble to make huge campaign scenarios with maps that actually give the player room to breath, so you get to work building your perfect dwarven fortress incorporating the terrain into the design. You beat the hell out of your opponent. Later on you're attacked again in the same county, the awesome castle you built is fucking gone because no persistence. You promptly abandon the RTS genre and play nothing until CKII released. Sure you lose out on the set piece keep-storming and rides of the Rohirrim, but the complexity you gain more than makes up for it.

Halo Wars and BFME were great. The genre is being actively suppressed. Also, the point about APM being a dexterity test and not a strategy test is correct. If anything, 4X games should be called "real time strategy games" and Starcraft 1v1 would be "skirmish games." Shit, Fallout Tactics probably has more "strategy" than most RTS titles

 

[Average Manatee]

On the dev side:

- Impossible to make work on consoles
- Very hard to monetize DLC for
- Fairly high production costs. It's not like a 120 hour RPG but its still expected to be fully voice acted, huge amount of graphical assets needed (like different worlds/climates and visually distinct units and factions), cutscenes, and you probably need to do a lot of work making your own custom engine for it all since there's not a standard like Unreal is for FPSs. And the engine "feel" is a huge part of RTS which is hard to describe but can easily kill a game for players who know better and would just go back to SC1/WC3.
- Aside from the MOBA split I think that a lot of Blizzard RTS players got sucked up into WoW which decreased the overall market size. Yes its a totally different game but that's what happened.

Blizzard tried hard as fuck to make SC2 a success on the level of SC1. They funded an assload of tournaments for like a decade with substantial prize pools. I think they tried to monetize a DLC like thing later in its life but that all failed (not that it was unprofitable but that it wasn't profitable enough). Apparently a single cosmetic for WoW made more money than all of SC2. Why spend so much time and effort on SC3 when its far less profitable? I assume games like Overwatch had a similar profitability disparity.

On the player's side:

Having a completely static set of starting conditions really annoys me and keeps things dull. It makes everything hyper-focused on build orders, timings, and like 5% map knowledge of whatever imbalanced bullshit can be done against your race. I would compare it to Chess, which is similarly hyper focused on openings. It makes you feel like you need to do 200 hours of homework to play the first 5 minutes well. RTSs need more randomization, akin to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess. I think AoE does this pretty well with random maps. Certainly some maps would be really imbalanced with races as different as SC1 but its hard to take advantage of that if you're only playing one game on a map and most competitive tournaments are forcing players to play best of 3s/5s/7s because we already know that a lot of official competitive maps are imbalanced.

The online experience could also really use some kind of persistent experience. Imagine if there was some kind of continual online story where in addition to skirmishes your race also had something akin to an official set of custom maps, with the overall "balance" of the war being decided by which race wins more maps in each month. Effectively make all those other game modes that players commonly play into a legitimate part of the game on part with skirmish. I remember all of the Helm's Deep maps for WC3 that were a lot of fun, there's stuff like tower defense, could even have a MOBA. Have things in a sort of rotation with new maps coming in every so often the same way skirmish has the map pool change every season.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

...BFME were great. The genre is being actively suppressed

I loved BFME II. I just hated that they didn't do a persistent map for War of the Ring mode. Might have been just outside their capability in 2006 but certainly not anymore. I agree though, there's no good reason an RTS can't have at least the complexity of 4x games by now, not exactly cloning that genre but you get the idea.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

It's not just consoles. You still had plenty of great strategy games for consoles, even TB ones. TB tactics fit nicely in consoles too.
The issue was the rampant rise of MMOs. Go look at any pc oriented gaming mag during the late 90s, there were actual articles about how "all games" would be mmos in the future. In fact, MMOs were kinda the thing to do from the mid 90s up until the late 2000s I'd say. There was also the fact that the genre just stagnated too much, very few games got the same recognition than C&C. From the late 90s the whole RTS thing was mostly about C&C, Starcraft and Homeworld - Age of Empires was certainly there too but for a lot of magazines it felt more like "a game that's pretty to look at" more than anything else. Homeworld was kind of a before and after moment for a lot of people, like everyone was literally drooling over it, but then nothing really happened.
And you might mention 4X games or city/town management like Impressions stuff but that's a different audience, closer to the tabletop-to-pc sort of crowd.

 

[Anomander]

Because the devs (or the execs) completely misunderstood players or just ignored them in pursuit of profit. After Starcraft every RTS (I mean war RTS C&C style, not some city builder or something) has been developed with multiplayer focus. Multiplayer was a huge minority interest and most of the players played only the campaign. After Starcraft focus shifted on multi, so the players left. Additionally creating a good campaing is hard and costly.

 

[Ash]

As a player that takes pride in having diverse tastes, I never got deeper into RTS beyond AoE 1 & 2 as well as C&C 1 & 2. I enjoyed these games a fair bit but it's not a genre with much potential to expand or reimagine, nor is the base concept particularly enjoyable in the first place. I hope I didn't miss anything grand as a result of abandoning the genre just like the devs did, but I don't think I did since everyone seems to say AoE2 is the GOAT. I play it and rapidly get sick of there not being much to it except how well you can micromanage, camera pan and remember shortcuts. Zzz. Still, I enjoyed my time with these games for sure, I just think they match a certain personality type and are inherently niche-er than more popular genres.

As for "impossible" on consoles, AoE I played on PC. C&C, one of the very first RTS, I played on console. Everything has been done on consoles, but enjoy living under your comfy rock. Cursor movement is slower and there's less shortcuts available? Pretty simple solution would be to just lower the AI intensity a little to compensate. "impossible" lol. Probably has the easiest fix of any PC genre best suited to M&K.

 

[rumSaint]

I think it' due to high production costs and issues with (bleh) monetization, other genres have it way easier. And you cannot release it for console peasants.

From the player side, well:
- Total lack of lore and story for recent attempts to release any RTS. Most succesful ones had fun storries and great cutscenes, Star Craft, Red Alert (Tim Curry seemed to have lots of fun acting in RA3). Of course it requires lots funds to begin with. Yes some people play games as singleplayer.
- High skill entry point. There is no escaping that, APM is king in this games, and whole tactics, are more like opening in chess, so you need to know what your opponent is up to to counter it.

It's kinda funny, fighting games escaped same fate, but they're more for consoles, and monetization with skins is very easy.

 

[Ash]

High production costs wut? Other genres have a way harder time there, e.g first person where you see everything up close in detail and are animating everything, people, guns, interactions etc in high detail, as well as can view everything from all angles.

The genre simply doesn't have much wider appeal if you ask me. It's about extreme micromanagement and not a lot else. There's not even much dopamine drip-feeding e.g pulling off a skillful headshot, mole-popping dudes at fast pace and watching their corpse explode up close is super satisfying. Whereas in RTS you command units, they plod along and after a delayed amount of time autokill the enemy, from afar (camera perspective); the dopamine hits come in less frequent phases. Really you shouldn't even be looking at the kill at all, but immediately moving along to the next units to issue yet more commands. Zzzz.

Genre for evil, petty, controlling workplace micromanagement types lol.

 

[bionicman]

This game killed the genre, because it was so good, you can't make a better rts anymore!

Spoiler

 

[Lyric Suite]

Consoles.

It's literally the most obvious answer.

"But, but, RTS games have been ported to console before"

Yeah so what, who is gonna play that shit seriously with a controller.

Xbox destroyed PC gaming almost overnight.

 

[rumSaint]

High production costs wut? Other genres have a way harder time there, e.g first person where you see everything up close in detail and are animating everything, people, guns, interactions etc in high detail, as well as can view everything from all angles.

The genre simply doesn't have much wider appeal if you ask me. It's about extreme micromanagement and not a lot else. There's not even much dopamine drip-feeding e.g pulling off a skillful headshot, mole-popping dudes at fast pace and watching their corpse explode up close is super satisfying. Whereas in RTS you command units, they plod along and after a delayed amount of time autokill the enemy, from afar (camera perspective); the dopamine hits come in less frequent phases. Really you shouldn't even be looking at the kill at all, but immediately moving along to the next units to issue yet more commands. Zzzz.

Genre for evil, petty, controlling workplace micromanagement types lol.

Oh because in RTS you don't have to animate every building, units, explosions etc

As for micromanagement part, yes. It's the worst part of RTS, not to mention APM required to be at least bit competetive. That's why MOBAs kinda replaced RTS games.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Because the devs (or the execs) completely misunderstood players or just ignored them in pursuit of profit. After Starcraft every RTS (I mean war RTS C&C style, not some city builder or something) has been developed with multiplayer focus. Multiplayer was a huge minority interest and most of the players played only the campaign. After Starcraft focus shifted on multi, so the players left. Additionally creating a good campaing is hard and costly.

The problem with this theory is that most RTS games after Starcraft never actually focused on muiltiplayer, they all stuck to single player.

The only exception to this was Dawn of War, a game which last i checked had more than a moderate amount of success.

Meanwhile, some notable RTS games failed because of the lack of good multiplayer. Battle Realms failed because it couldn't compete with the online capabilities of Warcraft 3.

 

[Lyric Suite]

As for micromanagement part, yes. It's the worst part of RTS, not to mention APM required to be at least bit competetive. That's why MOBAs kinda replaced RTS games.

Never played a MOBA but this seems to suggest MOBAs are actually dumped down shit by comparison. Kinda like modern team shooters like Overwatch when compared to the arena shooters of old.

 

[Morenatsu.]

As a player that takes pride in having diverse tastes, I enjoyed these games a fair bit but it's not a genre with much potential to expand or reimagine, nor is the base concept particularly enjoyable in the first place.

Yeah it's not as good as holding W1 so like what a shit genre amirite lmao. Like all you do in RTS is real-time strategy thats so fucking boring!! Consoles 4 lief bro

 

[Steve]

I think part of the reason is that people seem to be drawn towards team based games. Most popular games are online and are team based. Gaming has become a "social" hobby over the years.

Dueling is way more punishing and somewhat personal even, you have no team mates to rely on support or to blame for your own fuckups, they require some introspection and learning from your own mistakes instead of always blaming others. If you get a horrible rank it's all on you. Team based games are so much easier to get into, you can join your friends who can be much better at the game and they can carry you without you even realizing how bad you actually are.

 

[Johannes]

Damn a lot of guys who don't play rts multiplayer, educating ppl on what makes a good rts player