Can RTS Be Saved? (Ep.97)

Al, Jack, and Nuno investigate whether real-time strategy can recover from decades of decline, tracing its fall through the console migration and the demise of genre giants Westwood and Blizzard, and asking whether upcoming titles like Total War: Warhammer 40,000 and a Game of Thrones RTS can bring the genre back.

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This episode revisits the question of RTS’s commercial decline, building on an earlier discussion from four months prior. Al, Jack, and Nuno examine the historical migration of gamers from PC to console as a key factor, the collapse of genre-defining studios Westwood and Blizzard, and RTS’s own role in spawning the MOBA genre that arguably contributed to its decline. The conversation turns to a striking pattern in recent failures: multiplayer-first RTS titles like Battle Aces and Stormgate consistently underperform despite significant funding and pedigree, while titles with strong single-player campaigns succeed. The hosts debate whether indie developers or AAA franchise titles represent the genre’s best hope, and close with cautious optimism about upcoming releases including Total War: Warhammer 40,000, Dawn of War 4, and a Game of Thrones RTS.

Critical Moves Podcast – Episode 97 Show Notes

Episode Title: Can RTS Be Saved?
Hosts: Al, Jack, Nuno
Episode Length: ~53 minutes

Episode Summary

Revisiting a topic last covered four months prior, this episode examines whether real-time strategy games can recover from their decades-long commercial decline. The hosts trace the genre’s fall through the historical shift from PC to console gaming, the collapse of defining studios Westwood and Blizzard, and RTS’s ironic role in spawning the MOBA genre that helped displace it. A central finding emerges: multiplayer-focused RTS titles like Battle Aces and Stormgate consistently fail despite significant funding, while titles built around strong single-player campaigns succeed. The conversation closes with cautious optimism about upcoming AAA and indie releases, including Total War: Warhammer 40,000, Dawn of War 4, a Game of Thrones RTS, and Sanctuary: Shattered Sun’s blockbuster Kickstarter result.

First RTS Memories

Nuno and Al both cite Age of Empires II and Command & Conquer: Red Alert as their formative RTS experiences from the mid-to-late 1990s, while Jack, representing a younger, console-first generation, also names Age of Empires II as his introduction, though experienced years after its original release.

The PC-to-Console Migration

Al argues that RTS’s decline closely tracks the broader migration of gamers and money from PC to console gaming, particularly through the PS2, Xbox 360, and PS3 era, since traditional RTS games depend heavily on mouse-and-keyboard precision that consoles struggle to replicate.

Halo, Ensemble, and Microsoft’s Mature Audience Gamble

Jack details Microsoft’s 2001 decision to launch the original Xbox with Halo, a mature-rated first-person shooter aimed at capturing an adult audience that consoles hadn’t previously served. He notes the irony that Ensemble Studios (creators of Age of Empires) later developed Halo Wars specifically for console play, and connects this history to Age of Empires’ current ownership under Microsoft’s World’s Edge studio, which continues developing for both PC and console.

A Confluence of Factors, Not One Cause

Nuno pushes back against attributing RTS’s decline to a single cause, citing console market consolidation, the concurrent rise of first-person shooters, and the emergence of mobile gaming as competing factors that fragmented RTS’s potential audience during the same period.

RTS and Its Own Demise: MOBAs

Al highlights the irony that RTS effectively spawned its own successor genre, with DOTA originating as a Warcraft III custom map before evolving into League of Legends and the broader MOBA genre, which subsequently drew away much of the audience that might otherwise have continued playing traditional RTS titles.

The Collapse of Westwood and Blizzard’s RTS Legacy

Al notes that the two studios most responsible for defining RTS as a genre, Westwood Studios (Command & Conquer) and Blizzard (Warcraft, Starcraft), have both effectively ceased meaningful RTS development. He interprets EA’s recent release of Command & Conquer: Generals’ source code as a tacit admission that no new Command & Conquer game is forthcoming, while noting Starcraft II has received no meaningful updates since 2020 and has since gone free-to-play.

The Next Xbox as a PC

Jack raises Microsoft’s rumored and partially confirmed plans to transform the next generation Xbox into a Windows-based PC capable of running Steam libraries directly, asking whether narrowing the gap between console and PC hardware might eventually revive RTS by merging the older, more affluent console audience with PC-native strategy gaming culture.

Accessibility and the Steep Learning Curve

Al connects RTS’s decline partly to accessibility: older console-owning audiences with greater disposable income but less free time favor games with lower cognitive load and shorter learning curves, disadvantaging RTS’s traditionally steep skill requirements compared to more immediately approachable genres like first-person shooters.

Battle Aces: The Accessibility Experiment That Failed

Al details Battle Aces, a Starcraft II-developer-created RTS backed by Tencent investment and designed around strict 10-minute matches specifically to improve genre accessibility, which was nonetheless cancelled in May 2025 due to insufficient early access interest, despite significant funding and pedigree.

The Multiplayer Trap

Nuno argues the real cause of recent RTS failures isn’t accessibility but a persistent mismatch between developer focus and actual audience demand: developers keep chasing a small, already-saturated competitive multiplayer audience (largely locked into existing games like Starcraft II) rather than serving the much larger single-player-focused majority. He cites the very short list of genuinely successful competitive multiplayer RTS titles (Company of Heroes, Age of Empires II, Starcraft II, Beyond All Reason) as evidence of how narrow that market actually is.

Data on Single-Player Preference

Al cites polling data showing an 80/20 split favoring single-player preference among RTS audiences broadly, along with a striking statistic that 70% of Age of Empires III players have never won a single multiplayer match, reinforcing that the overwhelming majority of the audience simply isn’t engaging with competitive play regardless of a game’s multiplayer focus.

Why Multiplayer-First Design Hurts Single-Player Quality

Nuno argues that designing an RTS with multiplayer balance as the primary consideration actively undermines single-player enjoyment, since balance requirements discourage the kind of wildly overpowered units, superweapons, and asymmetric factions that make single-player campaigns memorable and fun.

Stormgate’s Collapse

Al details Stormgate’s dramatic underperformance despite raising $3 million via Kickstarter and $35 million from investors, noting the game struggled to maintain even double-digit concurrent players 18 months post-launch, and lost multiplayer server infrastructure entirely when an AI company acquired its hosting provider.

What Successful Recent RTS Titles Got Right

Al highlights Tempest Rising, Age of Mythology: Retold, and Sins of a Solar Empire II as recent successes, all sharing strong single-player campaigns as a common thread distinguishing them from multiplayer-first failures like Battle Aces and Stormgate.

The Franchise Marketing Problem

Jack offers a third perspective: RTS’s core challenge may be less about single-player versus multiplayer and more about the difficulty of marketing entirely new intellectual property compared to games built on established franchises like Star Wars, Warhammer, or Game of Thrones, which carry built-in audience interest regardless of genre unfamiliarity. He suggests RTS as a format may simply be poorly suited to introducing new IP compared to other real-time genres like Mount & Blade-style sandbox RPGs.

Upcoming Titles: Total War: Warhammer 40,000 and War for Westeros

Nuno highlights Total War: Warhammer 40,000 and the newly revealed Game of Thrones RTS, War for Westeros, as encouraging signs given their focus on single-player campaign content and built-in franchise appeal, drawing a visual comparison between War for Westeros and Battle for Middle-earth.

Dawn of War 4 and Continued AAA Investment

Al notes that Creative Assembly (Total War: Warhammer 40,000), an unnamed publisher behind the Game of Thrones title, and Relic-adjacent studio behind Dawn of War 4 collectively represent continued meaningful AAA investment in RTS, offering some reassurance that major studios haven’t fully abandoned the genre.

Are Indie Developers the Future of RTS?

Both Nuno and Al argue that indie and small-team developers (citing Sanctuary: Shattered Sun, Dust Front, Falling Frontier, and Dwarf as examples) may represent the genre’s most sustainable future, since their definition of commercial success requires vastly smaller audiences than AAA titles supporting hundreds of staff, while still often reaching largely overlapping fan communities.

Double-A Successes: Stronghold and Zero Space

Nuno highlights Stronghold’s successful Definitive Edition remasters from Firefly Studios and the recently launched early access title Zero Space, which has already accumulated over 1,000 Steam reviews, praising its innovative drag-to-form battle-line control scheme as a genuinely novel mechanic.

Console Parity as a Future Catalyst

Jack argues that regardless of whether the next Xbox literally becomes a PC, increased platform parity between consoles and PC (as demonstrated by Paradox’s recent Stellaris console development changes and Creative Assembly’s simultaneous console launch for Total War: Warhammer 40,000) could meaningfully expand RTS’s potential audience by removing historical barriers to console-based strategy gaming.

Sanctuary: Shattered Sun’s Kickstarter Result

Al shares an update on Sanctuary: Shattered Sun’s Kickstarter, which closed at 961% of its funding goal, raising nearly $985,000 from close to 10,000 backers, describing it as an exceptional result for a small indie RTS studio.

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Episode Verdict

This episode succeeds by grounding a familiar “is the genre dying” conversation in specific, verifiable data points rather than pure nostalgia or speculation, particularly the concrete player-count and funding figures for Battle Aces and Stormgate that make the multiplayer-first failure pattern feel undeniable rather than anecdotal. Jack’s franchise-marketing angle adds a genuinely distinct third perspective that neither simply restates the accessibility argument nor the single-player-versus-multiplayer debate, broadening the analysis meaningfully. The closing survey of upcoming titles, tempered by Al’s stated intention to specifically track Total War: Warhammer 40,000’s console sales performance as a real test case, gives listeners a concrete benchmark to watch for rather than leaving the question purely open-ended. Al’s disclosed involvement with Sanctuary: Shattered Sun is handled transparently, and the episode benefits from ending on a genuinely strong, verifiable success story rather than manufactured optimism.