You know, the more I think about it, the more you are right. RTS is probably not an AAA genre at all. It was never and never will be. It just Blizzards Starcraft and World of Warcraft messed up the mindset of the gaming industry.
So something that is actually a single-player, middle-budget product, was dragged into a niche it could never ever financially survive. So my point is, Xbox should finally realize for today’s situation their AAA approach on the market isn’t right anymore, or they all are going to lose their jobs and we are going to lose our games.
New IPs and new AAAs are not going to magically save them; the math clearly does say the market is too saturated, and it doesn’t represent the needs their customers have.
-We don’t have the numbers to man the online servers
-We don’t have the time to grind free-to-pay games
-We even don’t have the hardware to run those bloated AAAs
- They don’t need to add everywhere all those live service, DRMs, exclusives and online stuff.
I think the gaming market needs something like a 2D remake of isometric Fallout 1+2 for 20 dollars. Or bring back on steam and GoG Freelancer. Sure, it’s not the big money, but at least feasible profit.
And look at Xbox, I don’t need a fancy, expensive console. A cheap, affordable, and upgradable console would be cool for Kids to do their homework, like Xbox HomeWork Edition with Excel, Paint and MS-Word, for 200 dollars so kids could use it as PC to do homework and you could upgrade it as a grown-up, by easily exchanging the parts.
SC2 was on launch the most played game in the world. The problem is not that RTS is not a popular genre, it’s that game studios do not understand what most RTS players want.
Starcraft is as usual an outlier. The fact that said massive popularity didn’t transfer to any other franchise, ever, demonstrates this.
I don’t think Tempest Rising doesn’t know what RTS players want. The people that do play it, like it. The same goes for Command & Conquer (historically). The same goes for DoW or CoH.
However Tempest Rising and Dawn of War are both notably different from Starcraft. So what’s more likely: that three different takes on RTS are all magically incorrect, or maybe there’s a different answer?
(my guess: RTS games require time investment and have a moderate to steep learning curve. Combined with audience projections makes it a riskier bet to safer genres for investors)
RTS used to be a AAA genre around 2000 when AoE2, CnC2, SC1 and WC3 released. But games just grew bigger since. The same budget that used to be AAA is now just AA.
Really? I doubt that. Things like Call of Duty were already big at that time.
Then again that was 16 years ago. SC2 is much closer to the AoE2 release then to the current year.
The main reason for the death of RTS is the transition to consoles. In 2000 the PC market was similar size compared to the consol market. Then consols dominated in 2010 with all attempts to bring RTS to console failing. Now the PC market is growing again so there is a chance for an RTS revival.
Though secretly RTS are the most popular genre in all of video games if you include the mobile market… There are so many strategy games on mobile, just a lot simpler ones. I mean even Plants vs. Zombies is an RTS if you think about it.
Kinda. Wave defense isn’t a new concept and isn’t strictly RTS. I played the first DotA wave defense mapmods (a lot of them), I’ve played a bit of Defense Grid, and so on.
The jump from there to RTS with armies and factions is a bit different. Scratches a different itch. A lot more macro / forward planning, a lot less reactivity and (basically no) micro.
Will be interesting to see if your market analysis is true. RTS (and strategy) games are increasingly being developed for console, as well.
Well, they do make constant and some times even major changes to the game, for all players. And in many cases, that has caused controversy (Stellaris FTL redesign as a major example).
However, it must be said that they do allow players to roll back to a previous version of the game if they don’t like the changes.
Many companies forget what it means to make great products.
After initial success, sales and marketing people take over
and the product people eventually make their way out.
— Steve Jobs
1 Well, from my point of view, Xbox and many other AAA game companies today simply lost the product people.
This created a dangerous business temptation: rather than making a better RTS for people who love RTS,
they make a more accessible hybrid that management hopes everyone will play.
It alienates the core audience without attracting a sufficiently large new one. So it failed.
2 In my opinion Entertainment today like Xbox , AAA Gaming, Movies and AI is simply stuck in the wrong loop.
A Product-oriented approach would be this
Observe customer behavior → identify the underlying problem → improve the product → measure whether customers love it more → repeat.
A sales and marketing approach is kind of misguided
Sales decline → change pricing, distribution, marketing, or organizational structure → hope the numbers improve → repeat if they don’t. → repeat if they don’t till run out of money.