Mostly because designing for e-Sports has a massive effect on options and creativity of an RTS - keeping the game balanced and fair for competitive play comes with a massive tradeoffs in creativity, faction diversity and player options (especially if the developer does not have large amounts of time for balance testing).
And since for some reason everyone wants a piece of that pie the RTSes have become a bit... bland. No more crazy unbalanced C&C superweapons, no more unfeasable "useless" underground units, no more extreme unbalanced side diversity of Relics DoW1, no more composable units of Earth 2150. The games got boring for everyone but the most core RTS group (which is probably already playing SC2) in SP. They got extremely unpleasant to play in MP if you're a beginner (SC2 is anything but fun on basic levels with it's economic timing pressure while playing).
As a consequence, the majority of SP players have rejected those games (and in a lot of cases moved to more accessible MOBAs) and the extremely pro community just isn't big enough to splinter into several games communities.
I absolutely agree that striving for greater "balance" has ruined, or at least made less fun, a lot of games. Knowing that the maps in, say Halo, are optimized by hotspot and killspot to spread out play, or knowing that map and player data is used to redesign levels in, say, Left 4 Dead, is kinda depressing.
With such finely-tuned games (and the Youtube strategy sharing mentioned in a sibling), it becomes frankly rather tedious to compete.
It's especially annoying in games that heavily favor micro management for units...it favors people who can quickly execute a dumb strategy over ones who can slowly execute a smart one. It favors people who can remember exact build timelines. Because all else is equal (because the sharp edges have been ground off during "balancing"), the winners are just the folks who can interface fastest.
And when you're game depends on basically "Here, who can deal with our clunky interface the fastest", it feels like bullshit artificial difficulty.
In Total Annihilation, for example, we always found that unit counts were large enough and AI decent enough that fights became about mid-long term planning and basically warring economies, not who could successfully dance a flock of zergs most effectively through a static defense.
I play from time to time 10-15 year old RTS games like Age of Mythology and C&C Generals against bots in SP on random maps. For me it's a lot more rewarding playing a real RTS than going from bottom left to top right in e.g. League of Legends.
RTS is great as it is about planning economy (buildings, resources) and planning war strategies. RTS aren't that hard to grabs', a new player can learn it in 10-15min, but a game can last up to about two hours or more - and one cannot watch TV while playing or something else aside with a real RTS.
For some reason it seems a newer wave of players favor repetitive gameplay with instant rewards that may have familiarity with gambling mechanics (getting hooked) over freedom and choice.
I would pay premium for a new RTS game that delivers the old gameplay mechanics and has a more realistic theme (like C&C, Age of Empire - and no aliens) with a good highend graphics and physics game engine.
Add to that the level of increased communication and strategy available via internet and especially sites like youtube. Now everyone has the tools and info to tell which strategy is the best, at lower levels you're often better suited to just follow the exact steps someone else used and you'll win, but that's boring. Not doing it implies always losing however.
There's room for creativity only at the very bottom and the very top.
I'm not so sure. There used to be plenty of walk-throughs published in gaming magazines as far back as I can remember. While I don't recall any for RTS' (Dune II wasn't that hard, IMHO) -- I do seem to recall eg: Shadow of the Beast, Another World, Flashback and Chaos Engine having some big guide specials in the 90s.
Sure, it's easier to just go and look stuff up now -- but I don't really think that has much to do with the decline. After all, if someone wants to ruin their fun by following a manual -- why would they spend money on the game in the first place?
EA happened. They bought and destroyed the various classic RTS series. Westwood and Command and Conquer, Bullfrog and Dungeon Keeper. Should I link you to this: https://i.imgur.com/QzSPDMY.png
Opening of the market- gaming was suddenly less important then a consumeable story. Everyone can consume a actionflick- not everyone can become a general and really keep a battlefield coordinated. The genre is also not so ideal to tell a story.
right, the "ladder anxiety" in being a reasonably good solo ladder SC2 player can be tough to get over for a new player with each loss, even though the matchmaking algo is pretty good at keeping you at a 50% winrate over time. The multitasking required for RTS is difficult and can be frustrating. It's also unclear how to improve efficiently, if you're not plugged in with the various forums/reddits/youtube, etc.
All of the other team based MOBA/FPS games seem so much more accessible and immediately rewarding. Aside from the current free-to-play boom, I think big companies like Blizzard see this and pour resources into Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm.
As a person who has played starcraft regularly since BW and SC2 beta and still plays today, if I was a kid looking at the competitive gaming landscape today, i feel like there's little chances I would go for and RTS over everything else that's out there.
Yeah. Everything has to have a story and dialog nowadays. New X-COM was especially painful. I hate when they interrupt or bend good game mechanics with totally unnecessary Hollywood story.
To add even more, I'm going to throw out a hypothesis (and fair warning, this is all speculation on my part.)
I think what others have said is correct, but I also have to wonder how access to broadband and the internet affected the games. Back in the day, most RTS were single player games with a nice multiplayer addition. But you would have problems playing it without going to a friends house/LAN party. There, you were playing against friends and people you were effectively face to face with. It was competitive, but you were there for fun.
Once the games became focused towards multiplayer, with a single player as the side, the games were mostly about competing against other people, people you didn't know, had very little social connection too, and it was all about how fast you could click. I think (at least for me, this was true) made the games much less fun. To have any chance of actually winning, you had to be very good. When you're playing people you don't really know, only to lose the game over and over again online, it doesn't quite become as much fun.
> To have any chance of actually winning, you had to be very good.
This is a relatively solved problem. With SC2, unless you're in the top or bottom 1% of players, your win rate over a sufficiently large number of games will be 50%. You'll have losing streaks (and they can be pretty stressful), but you don't get thrown into game after game where you have no hope of winning.
This is misleading. The most popular competitive games: League of Legends, Dota 2, CSGO, and SC2, are all PC exclusives. The problem with RTS games isn't that they don't work on consoles, it's that they aren't that fun to play for most people. It takes a long to play a single game, and there's no progression.
With the push to make strategy games more like RPGs (heck look at all of the FPS games with "loadouts" and RPG elements), games like League and Dota really work much better, and have more people playing them than any other game ever. For example, more people played league of legends yesterday[1] than have bought the last CoD game since November[2].
Obviously only taking league into account kind of breaks everything, because it's the most popular anything that has ever existed, but I'm not sure how people don't understand that the PC gaming market is much larger than the console gaming market[3].
> it's that they aren't that fun to play for most people
I question if repetitive games like MOBAs are really more fun, or just have an greedy and addicted game mechanics that has been pioneered with the old Diablo 1 (1996). Is it only me that playing MOBA is to let your off steam, clear your mind like playing a simple ego-shooter or passively watching a TV series on your sofa after you come home from hard work. Or is it really fun to play like traditional non-repetitive games?
Example: I remember Farmville, and for me the fun part was very short and it quickly got a lot of repetitive greedy work and the game tried a lot to get me hooked.
MOBAs have a killer learning curve. You only know you can be better because for about a month straight when you first start you just /lose/ to people who are obviously better.
But you do improve, and you start to feel like a bad ass.
Of course then ELO comes in and ensures you only ever win 50% of the time. It is always made obvious that there is another level of skill above what you currently possess.
I prefer single player games with bots which difficulty level is selectable. Playing against 8 "very hard" bots and winning 80% and having the freedom of a real/classic RTS is a lot more rewarding at least to me. Some people prefer repetitive work that the hone ability to perfection in a factory like a human robot. Some prefer always changing gameplay that requires macro and micro management and economic amd military strategy fun to play. If there is a game selection for both groups, everyone would be happy.
>PC-only titles are scarce these days because profitability is too low to justify an AAA budget
This is one of those things that gets repeated that just BS. Counter Strike, Dota and LoL are all PC exclusive and they're all where professional esports is clustered right now. Valve is making money hand over fist on microtransactions. They take a small cut from each one, and all you have to do is look at the recent activity [1]* on a single item from a single game then extrapolate it out to realize how much money they have rolling in.
* I just went to the steam community market, clicked on the first case I saw an linked to it.
So, first of all clearly the RTS in the generic sense isn't actually dead (e.g. MOBAs, tactical wargames, tower defense games). Even the classic C&C-style base building RTS isn't quite dead, a few still get released every year. For example last year there was Planetary Annihilation and Grey Goo. It's just that even the nostalgia factor can't make those games succeed any more.
The problem is that the classic RTS isn't actually very fun to play. There's too much cognitive overload, too much micro-management, and perhaps a bit too many genre conventions that need to be crammed into the game making it actually feel like the same game I played 20 years ago. Every time I try one of them these days it's like one hour before I give up realizing I don't actually want to play it. In contrast to that I could obsess for weeks over a non-traditional RTS like Offworld Trading Company.
> e.g. MOBAs, tactical wargames, tower defense games
None are RTS. I prefer the idea of Real Time Tactics for these games, if that makes more sense. Smaller scale individual battles vs large scale building out of armies and large battles.
People like MOBA's because they are too dumb for RTS? Sounds plausible. /s
MOBA originated as a sub-genre of (A)RTS. There are also other sub-genres like MMO strategy games (e.g. Clash of Clans).
That said, I remember RTS as Triple-A genre with games like Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, Age of Mythology, Empire Earth, Dune, Star Craft, WarCraft, etc. A complete genre has been dead since 2006. RTS doesn't translate very well to consoles with their controller input device, though it would work fine on touch devices and on the evergreen PC/notebook.
