2012: bad year for RTS?

[Gary Childress]

2012 seemed like a bad year for my favorite gaming genre. Looking at one list of top games of 2012 I don't see many RTS games that came out this year. Plenty of shooter games came out but not much in the way of RTS nor really much in the way of strategy games at all. Sure there was Civ V G&K but other than that it seems like a pretty lean year overall.

http://www.gameoftheyear.org/ratings/pc/1-highest-rated-2012/1

 

[GoodGame]

A new Sins came out in 2012. I think there are a few RTS games in the indie scene. Tower defense seems to have colonized the RTS crowd, in that some Tower Defense games are definitely RTS in style.

2012 was a very big year for MOBAs which are like bastard children of RTS.

Maybe like the TB market shifted to RTS, now RTS market shifts to MOBAs?

 

[Maniacal]

It is nice to see that at least one genre isn't being unnecessarily flooded with gimmicky and/or annual releases. It seems that the big RTS developers are giving their next games a good amount of development time. Although it doesn't help that many of the RTS franchises and even developers are dead.Those still going on had a major release and/or expansions in the last 1-3 years too.

 

[Antilogic]

As someone with no skill in these types of games and even less knowledge of the current market, which major developers are still working on RTS-type games and which ones have died out?

 

[Double A]

Every year is a bad year for RTS.

 

[Maniacal]

As someone with no skill in these types of games and even less knowledge of the current market, which major developers are still working on RTS-type games and which ones have died out?

Well of the top of my head (and maybe including a couple of not quite so major devs):

Some of the previous but now dead developer are:
Ensemble Studios - Age of Empire & Mythology series
Westwood Studios - Command&Conquer series
Stainless Steel Studios & Mad Doc - Empire Earth 1 & 2
PopTop Software - Tropico 1 & 2 (merged with Firaxis)
Bullfrog Productions: Numerous (Populous, Dungeon keeper)
Big Huge Games - Rise of Nations
Cavedog Entertainment - Total Annihilation
Ascaron Entertainment - Patrician, Port Royale

Dead to me:
Firefly - Stronghold series

Probably dead to others now:
EA Los Angeles - (LotR: Battle of Middle Earth, Command & Conquer/Red Alert 3, Medal of Honor (now Danger Close Games))

Still alive:
Related Designs - Anno series
Haemimont Games - Various (Tzar, Grand Ages, Tropico 3 & 4)
TimeGate Studios - Kohan (never played it, they make FPS games now (FEAR, Section 8)
Best Way + Digitalmindsoft: Men of War
Blizzard: Starcraft, Warcraft
Ubisoft Blue Byte - The Settlers
Eugen Systems - RUSE
Relic - Numerous (Homeworld, Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40k)
Paradox Interactive - EU, CK, HoI, etc
Stardock: Sins of a Solar Empire
Creative Assembly: Total War series

 

[Double A]

Stardock also does GalCiv. I have the second one and it's awesome.

 

[Sonereal]

GalCiv isn't real time.

Besides Total Annihilation, I'm not looking forward to much unfortunately. Maybe Generals 2, but I hate EA.

 

[Oruc]

2012 seemed like a bad year for my favorite gaming genre. Looking at one list of top games of 2012 I don't see many RTS games that came out this year. Plenty of shooter games came out but not much in the way of RTS nor really much in the way of strategy games at all. Sure there was Civ V G&K but other than that it seems like a pretty lean year overall.

http://www.gameoftheyear.org/ratings/pc/1-highest-rated-2012/1

It's been bad for RTS for quite awhile, I moved on to RPGs instead.
Although I did buy Hegemony gold: wars of ancient greece recently thats been fun so far (the game came out in 2011 apparently I had never heard of it until I stumbled over it a few weeks ago in Game)

 

[Double A]

Hey.

Why not just play video games.

 

[Oruc]

Hey.

Why not just play video games.

Who are you referring too?

 

[Double A]

I don't ignore genres when I think they aren't doing well, I ignore genres when I don't like them. You seem to like RTSes, so don't cut yourself off from them.

 

[Oruc]

I don't ignore genres when I think they aren't doing well, I ignore genres when I don't like them. You seem to like RTSes, so don't cut yourself off from them.

Well I just said I was playing hegemony, but if their aren't many RTS games coming out and the ones that come out and you try aren't very good, you stop throwing money away.

 

[OrsonM]

RTS became Tower Defense, MOBA or dumbed down tactics oriented RTS. Under the assumption that it would lead to a genre that would generate more profits or that could be easily ported to consoles. The result was an overblown amount of Tower Defense games and almost every single RTS franchise ruined once it made the jump to Tactics RTS (C&C 4, DOW2, EE3, etc).

Free to Play MOBAs, are relatively popular now, which will lead to the next step for RTS games: Free to Play RTS with a bunch annoying of unlockables. Considering the disaster that was Age of Empires Online (I don't care how many times they patch it, it still runs on Games For Windows Live), may god help us all.

 

[Double A]

You know how Double Fine is currently making an adventure game?

So stop panicking.

 

[OrsonM]

But that's an adventure game, we are talking about RTS games. I've tried to piece together what exactly you meant by that, but it's a bit nonsensical.

And they missed their deadline despite their huge funding. Then again, it's a Tim Schafer game, so a delay should had been expected.

 

[The_J]

I guess he meant that a few years ago everyone said that adventures are dead. But they aren't. So you should not be desparate because other people say that RTS are dead. The genre is not dying.

 

[LightSpectra]

Only counting new releases is missing part of the picture. There's also e-sports to consider, and SC2, LoL and DotA2 are doing really really well right now in terms of viewer counts and sponsorships.

 

[OrsonM]

I guess he meant that a few years ago everyone said that adventures are dead. But they aren't. So you should not be desparate because other people say that RTS are dead. The genre is not dying.

Wherever there are people that are willing to play (and more importantly pay) for the game, then yes, no genre is truly dead. But some things are just not coming back.

I mean in the RTS I'm working on, we adopted the notion of just not having base building, but having just an array of towers to defend (kinda like TD if not just the same thing). This came forth from the notion that it would be faster than to have mining, and farms, and whatever else (plus we are sucha god damn small team). We are trying to go old school with a number of things, but in other places we just have to let it go.

In any case, my sincere apologies to Double A, please accept this Wario as a token of friendship.

 

[Maniacal]

Your RTS sounds like a terrible game. I'd rather more traditional RTS games that I don't like get pumped out than any more takes on tower defense (which as already done to death by flash games years ago, not too mention the hordes of indie developers hoping onto the bandwagon). MOBA's is a branch off and there aren't even that many of them (that are worth knowing about anyway) and not something any of the traditional RTS developers are working on. As I said earlier, its nice to have at least one genre that isn't being flooded with more releases than you can keep up with. There are fewer but bigger/better quality RTS releases.