this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

You know, they said, 'An RTS is like PC-only by nature, why would you work on a single platform game when you could have made something multiplatform and another genre?'

Bruno thinks that's because big publishers are hoping for lightning-in-a-bottle hits that return 10 times their investment—"When you're operating at that scale, you want to build something that has the potential to sell 30 million copies," he said—and he doesn't think the RTS genre is ever going to produce that kind of success. If it did, he's skeptical the game in question would really be an RTS as he defines it.

So, first, even if the audience is limited, you can make a game that has a 10x return on investment if you can do the game on a smaller investment. A big publisher doesn't intrinsically need to do big-budget games.

Second, the genre grew up on the PC. And it often has conventions tuned to a PC platform. Precise selection, use of groups off a keyboard. But it seems to me that it's not impossible to produce new controls. The roguelike genre also was developed on a PC, and had a lot of conventions that were not friendly to other platforms, like use of many keyboard buttons that one would need to tap. But Shattered Pixel Dungeon ( [email protected] ) is a pretty good mobile adaption of the genre.

Based on this chart, video game revenue on the PC is relatively-strong compared to consoles in historical terms. What's new is mobile.

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/50-years-of-pc-vs-console-gaming-revenue-visualized-pc-maintains-lead-over-consoles-vr-mobile-and-handheld-market-data-included

According to that, in annual game revenue, consoles are about $30B, the PC is about $45B, and mobile -- the newcomer -- is $101B.

So, first-off, the PC is a quarter that. I'm not sure that it's unreasonable to do a game that targets a quarter of the market. There are lots of genres that target only some of those platforms. First-person shooters aren't gonna be all that great on mobile either.

Secondly, there have been console RTS releases. Off the top of my head, Supreme Commander also came out for the XBox 360. That series tends to be less of a clickfest, but it clearly means that doing an RTS on console is doable.

Thirdly, I think that console controllers are the hardest to adapt to that. I think that it's probably pretty reasonable to do a touch interface. And if you can do PC and mobile, that's more than three-quarters of the market.