Only one not long ago, when real-time strategy (RTS) games ruled the world. StarCraft emerged in the 90s as the most prestigious esports in the world. The first sequel to the game, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, which sold over 3 million copies in first month on the market. PC grognards are used to direct their entire hype index around Relic release. That’s the trump card they hold in the case of consoles — seriously, what’s the point of buying an Xbox if it’s unplayable Homeworld, Dawn of War, or Company of heroes?
Gamers have benchmarked the latest graphics cards by how well they can handle units that flood the screen. I remember being so scared Supreme Commander, and the mountains of RAM needed to display its fast and noisy spaceships. RTS games are even major players in the licensing ecosystem. I mean, it’s there when is a better movie Battle between Earth? Or War Empire?
This is life in the mid-2000s. Blizzard has proven that it’s possible to build a dominance from tight, well-balanced RTS titles and the rest of the industry power brokers jockeying for power catch up. Everyone swings. Remember Ubisoft’s EndWar? Or of EA Command & Conquer? Or, heck, from Nintendo Pikmin? No distribution portfolio is complete without a top RTS; The shareholders asked us to click and drag boxes over many idle shooters.
You can know the story from here. StarCraft II came in 2010 for a thorough evaluation and shortness of breath. Followed by two sequels to the campaign, which ended in 2015 with victory Legacy of the Void, and then, inexplicably, the signal died. New RTS games simply stopped coming out, seemingly overnight. The giants of the genre are all exhausted. New at last Command & Conquer entry is a free mobile game and we have all been waiting for the sequel Empire Earth for nearly two decades. The gas-powered game, which gave us the incredible highs of the aforementioned game Supreme Commander, started shopping in 2018. Ensemble Studios, which got us through it all with Empire series, which didn’t exist in the past 2009. Hell, Blizzard hasn’t released a new movie StarCraft game — RTS or otherwise — in six years. That reality was unthinkable in the heroic height of the Brood War. Now? It is just a sign of the times.
I am a lifelong RTS believer. One of the first games I loved was Red Alert 2, and I may be mistakenly looking at people who are permanently underrated World conflict. I suppose my life will forever be filled with new RTS games; that the genre will remain an unchanged priority in the economy of PC development. So I’m getting more and more confused as they disappear from the map. Why did people stop making RTS games? How did one of the holiest game modules — this sacred form that brought us our first official esports tournaments and a host of all-time classics — get ripped off to the curb? Luckily, some RTS production veterans have answers.
“There is an extremely stable player base around Starcraft II,” Tim Morten, who worked on RTS games at both Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard from 2014 to 2020. “That game has its own community. But other games are starting to outsize the human base. play it. You can point to MOBA [multiplayer online battle arenas], or battle royales, or any other genre. RTS did not break out to those levels. But it continues to be very healthy. I have seen the inner workings of the new RTS offering. For large public companies, they want to return maximum value to their shareholders. It’s just the business and they’re going to focus on the things that generate the most profit,” he said.
