Rumors of RTS demise may be exaggerated!
While there are fewer and fewer blockbuster level RTSs to date than there have been in the past, I'd say player interest itself seems to be doing fairly well by gamers. Most recently, Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition prompted a mini-resurgence of interest in the genre, and this game though decades old now is yet trending for the quarter in Steam's Top Selling Games. Despite release more than a month ago, it holds at the 21st top selling game on the Steam charts. Stats taken today from
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ show current players hovering around the 12.5k mark, peak at 13.3k. And! A closer look will show Age of Empires 2 (plain jane 2013) clocking in at 8.2k. If we take those concurrents together we're looking at around 20.7k combined for a single throwback title
released 21 years ago and places it smack dab between Red Dead Redemption 2 and Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot.
But dev studios don't want to touch it! I do think the issue the genre is suffering from is not enough adventurous stabs at new IP in this field. We've seen RTSs like Starcraft re-sculpt entire cultures around eSports and yet next to nothing in the way of experimental or development on new IP. The impact of mobile gaming and the expectations development studios have about what players want might well be flavoring why there have been no brave dives into this glorious genre that still engenders a lot of interest and retrogaming play. Not to mention some fairly big flagship fails in semi-distant history - Command and Conquer comes to mind.
What I'd like to see?
- Give me a cyberpunk future-dystopian RTS where megacorporations fight each other.
- Show me what the confluence of open world and survival would look like in an RTS. Let me play the Fallout wasteland real-time strategy game.
- Where's the power of procedural generation and modularity in RTS? If No Man's Sky can build me a planet to explore, why can't I have a Game of Thrones-esque RTS where dynastic houses, their units, terrain, and campaign is intensely random along predisposed, fun patterns?
- Give me a true persistent state world MMO RTS where my victories carry over into a private kingdom of my own, grown and improved like the old palace feature of Civilization.
My two cents!
-JP