Why are RTS games becoming unpopular?

tarcraft 2 that has seen a decline with its e-sports centric audience

Has it?

Do you happen to have figures?

Having researched RTS extensively for my article series (history of RTS), my current thought pattern would bet that there are fewer games, but larger audiences (as is the case with many genres in this age of convergence).

I don't see this as a dying genre, but rather, a genre that's emancipating. The concept of MMORTS is not entirely foreign, though a few forays have failed when attempting to do so.

Most likely, there's only so much one can add to the original RTS design without breaking its well-refined 'chess-feel'. Visual can keep being upgraded, but there isn't much else to do. Unless a brand is involved that is.

Warhammer 20k (Dawn of War II) was released in 2011, along with Illyriad (an MMORTS).

2012 Saw Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and a few Grand Strategy (Real time) games which qualify as RTS.

2013 Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Planetary Annihilation (Epic Scale RTS), Comapny of Heroes 2.

2014 - Agreed, hardly anything...

2015 - 5-6 major titles slated for production

I don't see evidence that RTS has become unpopular... Can you provide some?

While small it appears that the tournament funding for the SC2 scene has been diminishing slowly since 2012 before the expansion was even released while it is also being "out-popularized" by MOBA games in which the funding has increased exponentially.

http://www.esportsearnings.com/history/2014/games

Although an incomplete list this article shows that the quantity of quality titles coming out has diminished over recent years. Granted it takes more money and time to create AAA titles now so that must still be taken into consideration I suppose. As for the actual number of players playing these games it's entirely my speculation that they're decreasing. I don't see much hype or discussion about the genre (even though someone just recently started a hype thread about C&C on this board!)

I still believe over time investors will continue getting less confident with the genre opting instead to continue producing FPS titles and MOBA games in the already over saturated market.

Has it?

Do you happen to have figures?

I don't have any figures either, but I got the same feeling. I think that , compared to other genres, RTS games are really unpopular, there are only the really big names (Warhammer/Starcraft).

In my personal opinion the reason is the PC. Large publishers do not really target the PC market (hi-rate of piracy), other then producing sequel after sequel of an already successful brand. The console market is by far more interesting for publishers and RTS games are notorious hard to play with a controller.

Maybe some indie studios will provide more RTS games.

Because story driven pretty little first person shooters and the similar open world adventures make more money?

I honestly feel rts as a genre is doomed to stagnate. They dont lend them selves to emerssion as much as other titles.

Too. They dont have much room for new ideas beyond theme. But these are my opinions.

I don't really see this as anything new. RTS games have always played second fiddle to the more popular RPGs and Shooters. Also I think a lot of developers have distilled the mechanics down to produced the MOBA and Tower defence games that seem to be so popular nowadays.

Also the last console generation (PS3 and XBOX360) did everything but kill mouse driven PC gaming. Most PC titles were simply console ports but, now steam and kickstarter seem to be driving a renascence of real PC games written for PCs so we may see a resurgence of genuine RTS games in the near future.

I've been looking for a good RTS for ten years.

I dislike the direction they were going ever since Starcraft was introduced. While SC had many great things with a "perfect imbalance" set of factions after some patches, it also changed the strategy aspect that players wanted. Specifically, players demanded less "strategy" more race and rush. Playing online if you turn a game anything down from the fastest possible speed the other players will curse at you and leave.

Starcraft and C&C and other RTS games are nice enough in a local game, but go online with strangers and the G.I.F.T. kicks in, where friendly games don't exist. Either you are berated as noob or berated as a cheater, either option filled with profanity. Companies cannot realistically patrol it so their online community quickly falls apart.

LAN games are great, but suffer badly from piracy so the studios need to provide massive server support, which makes the games that much more expensive. Then you need people to moderate all the semi-anonymous jerks out there, and it stops looking like a good project.

Couple the problems -- hard to consistently make money and hard to maintain a community -- and bigger organizations stop developing the games, going for easier products.

I used to be a big fan of RTS, and I am one of the people who stopped playing RTS altogether.

(I will use Blizzard's RTS as examples, as they are the ones I have played the most.)

The game that killed my interest with RTS was Warcraft III. I didn't quite like the direction that Blizzard took with WC3. Micromanaging, heroes level system, completely imbalanced heroes, and it was hard to make a comeback. If you lose a battle, you lose the game. Without a comeback, it takes the fun away from RTS. Losing a unit is like losing a finger. It is not fun anymore, it becomes stressful.

Then, Starcraft II came along, and I could kind of see what they were trying to do with it. They brought back the ability to control large amount of units, and the game was kind of fun. I actually had my interest back, but then came the realization that in order to become good at this, I have to spend a lot of hours playing, just like any other game. I don't have time for that. SC2 was still stressful to a certain extent.

With DotA, I can play several sessions non-stop until I realized it's 3AM. With today's RTS, one game is enough. I can no longer handle the emotional toll, because the game is ongoing, the stress is ongoing, you have dozens of units to control, and a map to watch over. There is no break until you win or lose, and a game takes about half an hour to complete. That's pretty long to endure.

In DotA, you control one unit only, you have time to watch over the map. If your hero die or healing at the base, you can relax a little bit even for a few seconds. And the stress isn't building up until you engage the enemy heroes. Farming is stress free. So there's a good amount of emotional dynamic in MOBA games. While in RTS it's building up and up and up.

I think for RTS to pick up again, there need to be some sort of change in the way you play it. Have certain things to be automated so player can focus on other things.

Get rid of the peons/workers/peasants concept. They are completely unnecessary now. Resource mining should be automatic. One click to upgrade your resource throughput. This is current RTS: build more peasants, oops need to build a farm before I can do that. 20 minutes later, oh shit I forgot to build the peasant, no wonder my gold is running out, and now I am behind my opponent, I lose. !!!!

You don't need to free up a peon to build a thing.

Change the extreme clicking, the control over individual units.

Change the dreaded scroll-map-by-moving-your-mouse-to-the-edge-of-the-screen thing. When WC3 was announced that it would be in 3D, I was excited because now I thought I could zoom out to see the entire map. No. They didn't do it. Instead, you zoom in to see your units up close and personal. What was that for? In RTS, I want to strategize, direct units to certain spots in a map. If my only tool to do that is a tiny minimap on the corner of the screen, that's not good.

All of that, or maybe I am just getting old.

When it comes to building a multiplayer community, free to play MOBAs definitely have a lower barrier to entry, in terms of both price and the skills necessary to be decent at the game. RTS really isn’t suited for F2P monetization, as evidenced by the cancellation of the new C&C game, and it doesn’t have the mainstream appeal of other competitive genres like FPS.

Most of the people I know who switched from SC2 to DOTA/League did so because they like the team atmosphere and find it less stressful to play.

I also get the sense that that’s probably the majority opinion, but for me it’s actually the opposite. I don’t play MOBAs because I feel more stressed about letting the rest of the team down, whereas when it’s a 1v1 I’m more relaxed because I’m just playing for myself.

There are a few approaches that I think RTS can take to keep the genre fresh. There is a lot of relatively unused genre blending that I think would be engaging, and I think there are a lot of good ways to blend for instance, RTS and RPG gameplay in an interesting way. With the project I'm working on, I'm actually more interested in the RTS/4X combination, which I think is one of the other obvious evolutions of the RTS genre. I'd say that Sins of a Solar Empire and Divinity Dragon Commander were both good recent examples of that sub-genre of RTS, where you have the slow paced, big picture strategic element, but you also have direct control of real time battles. Unfortunately, I do think that Sins and especially Divinity suffered from less than stellar implementations of the core action-RTS mechanics and micromanagement elements that players have come to expect from these kinds of games.

When WC3 was announced that it would be in 3D, I was excited because now I thought I could zoom out to see the entire map. No. They didn't do it.

I disliked other things about the game, but this is one thing that Supreme Commander does pretty well -- you can actually zoom out until the entire map is visible, and when you zoom out far enough to make visual identification of units difficult they are abstracted as icons representing the type of unit -- I'd like to see that functionality expanded upon (to more capably handle groups of units and display other information) and included in more games.

(Note that Supreme Commander is the most recent RTS I have played by quite a long shot, so it's entirely possible I've missed this feature in other newer games.)

It seems like a lot of "modern" games suffer from the same thing ...

1: Very short play time - apparently the developers think players all have ADD now-a-days, and are afraid to make each level last longer than 4 minutes.

2: Very simplistic game play - push button, win the internet ! Do the devs seriously think players now can not figure out more complex game play mechanics ?

3: Very repetitive - this happens a LOT in FPS and MOBA ... do the exact same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over ...

It seems like a lot of "modern" games suffer from the same thing ...
1: Very short play time - apparently the developers think players all have ADD now-a-days, and are afraid to make each level last longer than 4 minutes.

Are they wrong? Isn't the watering-down and making-more-convenient an industry-wide trend, rather than being confined to the RTS space? And aren't most of these trends driven by actual player expectations?

2: Very simplistic game play - push button, win the internet ! Do the devs seriously think players now can not figure out more complex game play mechanics ?

It is entirely possible that many players can't figure out complex game play mechanics. Many of them lack the lifetime skills and background necessary to tackle complex mechanics.

This reminds me of the I Know Kung-Fu blog posts by Shamus Young. The overarching theme of those posts seems to be that strong skills in a particular genre are developed over many years of playing games in that genre, and as further games are developed that cater to the people that play those games, the newer installments increasingly assume a certain level of proficiency in the basic skillset. The result tends to be a game that is increasingly hostile to brand new players who don't have those basic skills. However, if you leave those assumptions out, the result tends to be a game that the core audience is contemptuous of, calling it "casual fare" and passing it by. So you either cater to the newbie audience, or you cater to the vets. And the vet audience is always shrinking, as people grow up and find other things to compete for their time.

The last decade or two saw a rapid expansion of the potential audience across all genres. Games stopped being things solely for young, testosterone-fueled males and started being things that anyone can play. However, the new audience members typically don't always have the hours of time necessary to complete a full RTS battle or to develop the comprehensive skills necessary to master a good, meaty RTS, leaving such mastery to an ever-dwindling pool of aging gamers who increasingly find less time to play.

I really only have personal, anecdotal evidence for these musings. I look at myself, and the many, many, many hours I spent as a young man, playing Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Starcraft, etc.... I honed my strategies playing against the computer, and tested them playing against my brother. We had the leisure to master the craft, and had vastly fewer potential distractions pulling us away. I look at my nieces and nephews, now, who love to play games. Their games, though, seem to me a very shallow and sticky mess of Android and iPhone nastiness, and they are constantly flitting from one app to the next, sometimes only playing for a few seconds or minutes at a time before moving on. And the games they play seem to reflect this type of play in their shallowness and approachability, trying to wrest minutes of a player's time rather than the hours they once did. Minutes of play time do not lend themselves well to deep, meaty games such as RTSs.

I think it's true, and a shame, that this genre seems to have passed its heyday. I haven't played an RTS since Supreme Commander either, but previously enjoyed many examples, some better than others. I think the difficulties faced by putting RTS games on consoles probably plays a significant part in accounting for the drop in interest from AAA studios. You're basically limiting your return by cutting out a huge proportion of the market, which would be accessible if you put that same investment into a MOBA or similar.

Being more optimistic about it, RTS is a genre that can be done right without AAA content production, with more emphasis on balanced gameplay and solid AI. So maybe the relative scarcity of recent hits might lead indies to fill the void and scoop up a market that's been somewhat abandoned. I'm thinking back to Darwinia, for example.

Specifically, players demanded less "strategy" more race and rush. Playing online if you turn a game anything down from the fastest possible speed the other players will curse at you and leave.

I hate playing an RTS where it comes down to click-speed and constant frenetic activity on the player's part. The thing I loved in classic RTS games was building a base and an army. It's meant to be a strategy game not a micromanagement game - I would like to watch battles unfold, etc.

Starcraft 2, in my humble opinion, has a huge focus on micro management. Playing that game requires some ridiculous multitasking skill. It's less strategy and more click speed beyond a point. Just look at the pro videos. Those matches are ridiculously fast paced. There's also my time commitment issues as well. I don't usually play for very much time (I can't usually spare much time honestly). I loved Supreme Commander. It's still my favorite RTS game mainly because of its scale.

I think for RTS to pick up again, there need to be some sort of change in the way you play it. Have certain things to be automated so player can focus on other things.

Get rid of the peons/workers/peasants concept. They are completely unnecessary now. Resource mining should be automatic. One click to upgrade your resource throughput. This is current RTS: build more peasants, oops need to build a farm before I can do that. 20 minutes later, oh shit I forgot to build the peasant, no wonder my gold is running out, and now I am behind my opponent, I lose. !!!!

You don't need to free up a peon to build a thing.

Change the extreme clicking, the control over individual units.

Change the dreaded scroll-map-by-moving-your-mouse-to-the-edge-of-the-screen thing. When WC3 was announced that it would be in 3D, I was excited because now I thought I could zoom out to see the entire map. No. They didn't do it. Instead, you zoom in to see your units up close and personal. What was that for? In RTS, I want to strategize, direct units to certain spots in a map. If my only tool to do that is a tiny minimap on the corner of the screen, that's not good.

All of that, or maybe I am just getting old.

Supreme Commander, in my opinion, did resource gathering well: just build the mass extractors at specified points and power generators. Sure there were things like fabricators to ad extra mass should you need it, but what I liked about Supreme Commander was that rather than not enough mass/power stopping your economy, it just slowed things down. Nor were there limited resources, so once you had balanced everything, you could keep on churning out more units without really needing to worry. Some games got rid of the resource gathering altogether, like World in Conflict and Endwar.

Like I said, resolving online matches (especially in a game like Supreme Commander) takes forever. I simply can't spare that kind of time. That's partially why I don't play as many RTS games as I'd like. Some clients have come up with the option to save an online match, which is more helpful.

I'm surprised no one has brought up Grey Goo - the new RTS from Petroglyph (who have a few original CnC devs) that just came out last week. It's very munch in the old CnC style with a focus on friendly play and macro over intense micromanagement. It even has Frank Klepacki doing the music. Granted, the campaign is pretty brutally hard, but if you've been missing CnC this is pretty much the spiritual successor to the good ones.

As to why the genre has been "dying"... I would say it's because no one figured out how to make one on console. Halo Wars made a good attempt but I don't think it sold too well. As much as I hate to say it, if you're a genre that only works on PC, most AAA publishers won't touch you with a 10 foot pole.

Fortunately we have plenty of non-publisher-controlled devs that seem to be bringing back the old PC-centric genres via smaller publishers or crowdfunding.

When WC3 was announced that it would be in 3D, I was excited because now I thought I could zoom out to see the entire map. No. They didn't do it.

I disliked other things about the game, but this is one thing that Supreme Commander does pretty well -- you can actually zoom out until the entire map is visible, and when you zoom out far enough to make visual identification of units difficult they are abstracted as icons representing the type of unit -- I'd like to see that functionality expanded upon (to more capably handle groups of units and display other information) and included in more games.

(Note that Supreme Commander is the most recent RTS I have played by quite a long shot, so it's entirely possible I've missed this feature in other newer games.)

R.U.S.E. and Sins of a Solar Empire comes to mind.

I'm surprised no one has brought up Grey Goo - the new RTS from Petroglyph (who have a few original CnC devs) that just came out last week. It's very munch in the old CnC style with a focus on friendly play and macro over intense micromanagement. It even has Frank Klepacki doing the music. Granted, the campaign is pretty brutally hard, but if you've been missing CnC this is pretty much the spiritual successor to the good ones.

As to why the genre has been "dying"... I would say it's because no one figured out how to make one on console. Halo Wars made a good attempt but I don't think it sold too well. As much as I hate to say it, if you're a genre that only works on PC, most AAA publishers won't touch you with a 10 foot pole.

Fortunately we have plenty of non-publisher-controlled devs that seem to be bringing back the old PC-centric genres via smaller publishers or crowdfunding.

I think R.U.S.E. was the closest thing we have to an RTS game that was controller-friendly, while still being streamlined enough for PC use.

I'm just going to leave a technical remark: some of you said you wanted to zoom out the entire map (and in Supreme Commander, still use the 3d models)

Well.... This is friggin hard. Older APIs suffered draw call limits, and eve modern ones... You still have to do very agressive lodding otherwise the GPU can't cope with the vertex count and one-pixel-sized triangles.

There was a reason losing a battle in WC III could mean losing the match: the size of your army was extremely limited. This obeyed a technical limitation: even at 90 soldiers per player a modern machine would scream with a +6 player map due to the high overhead of API draw calls from D3D9.

Today we can optimise that a lot, however players keep demanding bigger armies, better graphics and more variety, and this keeps limiting our ability to zoom out and still view everything in 3D

F2P games are where the money's at (for non-4X strategy games), and RTS don't tend to translate very well to the F2P model, from what we've seen so far.

There was an MMORTS called Ballerium by an Israelie developer that went bankrupt some years ago. It was basically WC3 but MMO-scale. Base building etc included. Also the classic Shattered Galaxy, along with recent MMORTS's like Soul Master, and a korean MMORPG/RTS I don't remember the name of. So it's not like adapting to a F2P model hasn't been tried, but it just seems to work better for smaller phone games.

In order for an RTS to get popular now, I think it would have to be F2P with paid campaigns, and be mostly centered around team play. People tend to enjoy playing games way more with friends, and RTS' have never focused on that as much as they focused on 1v1.

Let's see how Petroglyph's "Victory" turns out. 5v5 rts/moba hybrid. Kind of like end of nations.