Gonna say the same thing I said in a C&C thread a while back:
The death of the RTS genre still makes me kinda mad. I think RTSes are in the same position survival horror was a decade ago or so: they didn't actually lose popularity. There was no legitimate reason to decide they were dead. At worst, there was a bit of a glut, but at no point did people stop wanting to buy them and play them. But some executives in suits somewhere decided they were dead, and then it became the received wisdom, and here we are.
But it's worse than that, because while survival horror was revived by the efforts of indie developers, when it comes to RTSes, indie developers keep revisiting the genre in frustrating ways that are never going to appeal to the (relative) mass market of people who bought Warcraft 3 and Rise of Nations in droves.
So we have Grey Goo, whose developers for some reason decided to make insanely hard even on the "normal" difficulty setting, with poor tutorializing and a difficulty curve like a brick wall. (Oh, and they titled it "Grey Goo," one of the least appealing video game titles I've ever heard, and yes, I know what grey goo is, it's still a hilariously awful name.)
And then we have They Are Billions, which has made the astonishing decision to make it impossible to save, in a game where levels last 1.5 hours and all your careful planning can be ruined at the 11th hour by one tiny oversight or misunderstanding of the map. Because that's fun and appealing to the average player who might be mildly interested in a new RTS experience.
Then we have a smattering of RTS indie games, like Planetary Annihilation, which are laser-focused on becoming competitive multiplayer experiences and thus completely neglect their campaigns, skirmishes, enemy AI, and other single player features, leaving them either bare-bones or outright terrible. Because why court the millions of people who miss RTS campaigns and aren't being served at all, when you could instead try to compete head-on with League of Legends, DOTA, AutoChess, and Starcraft 2? I mean, look at those poll results! Why appeal to 95% of your audience and make a lot of money when you could appeal to 5% of your audience and fail spectacularly to make a mountain of money?
I just don't get it. Is there really not a single indie developer who wants to make a traditional, single-player (and/or co-op), base-building RTS, with good tutorials and well-explained mechanics, campaigns, robust skirmish settings, and difficulty settings pitched at the average player rather than superfans? I understand wanting to do something different, but literally no one is doing this. One of the most popular subgenres, with hundreds of entries from 1995-2005, is absolutely and totally dead, with the sole exception, kinda, of Starcraft 2? I just don't get it.
