We Said RTS Was on Life Support. Ashes of the Singularity II Just Changed the Conversation.

It wasn’t that long ago that I went on record to claim that RTS might not be dead, but it was on life support. You can watch that video, and agree or disagree as you see fit, here:

The numbers backed it up. New releases struggle to find traction and be noticed, but remasters from 20 years ago perform well. The irony is that the RTS community constantly says it wants new games, but then they don’t buy them when they arrive. It was an uncomfortable diagnosis, and it was hard to argue with.

But then Nextfest happened last month, and maybe, just maybe, the conversation has flipped.

Ashes of the Singularity II finished in the top fifty most played demos during the fest. To be clear: not top fifty strategy games, or top fifty RTS games, top fifty games period. The top fifty out of everything across a festival which drew over three thousand games. Out of all the imaginable genres, FPS, action, racing, platformers, a real-time strategy game landed towards the top of the charts. It ended Nextfest at the top of the real-time strategy category, and ranked in the top 1% of all Steam titles in terms of new wishlists and downloads.

If you’re a real-time strategy fan, this is a reason to be cheerful. It’s the kind of number that makes you revisit your diagnosis.

The game, developed by Oxide Games and published by Stardock, is a sequel ten years in the making. It asks you to command one of three factions across the solar system: the human-centric United Earth Force, the mechanical AI Substrate, or the enigmatic Post-Human Coalition. Battles are playable across single player, cooperative, and competitive multiplayer. The game has been designed with a focus on the strategic part of RTS. Whilst many games in the genre can be tough to master because of the requirement to micromanage, AotS2 promises to reward strategic skill. Logistics, planning, reading the terrain instead of actions per minute. For someone as old as me, that’s a welcome approach to making an RTS.

The demo which performed so well at Nextfest was, by Stardock’s admission, still at the alpha and beta stage. The AI Substrate faction was missing, as was the campaign. There are further gameplay adjustments still to come. The dev team spent time jumping into multiplayer matches alongside players during the event and took the experience from those matches back into the dev loop. This unfinished build outperformed the vast majority of a 3000+ game festival, and that kind of performance cannot be dismissed.

This is the exact intervention that RTS needed in 2026. It isn’t the sixth or seventh iteration of an established title, it’s not a remaster of a classic of the genre, it’s not even a game buoyed by community goodwill. Instead, it’s an RTS demo, still in early development, and competing against the best of the games industry – and winning the battle for attention.

The argument made in the video above (go watch it, and subscribe!) is not that the audience for RTS games has disappeared. The performance of remakes and remasters proves that it hasn’t. The argument was that new games in the genre were failing to reach them. They were failing to make an impact. The Nextfest result tells us that the audience still exists, it is still paying attention, and it was just waiting for something to come along and capture their attention. Ashes of the Singularity II has captured that attention.

If you’re a real-time strategy developer, working on a title, take these results to heart.

Stardock, it appears, have drawn the same conclusion. On March 10th they announced a major expansion of their publishing program for independent game developers. Consider the context. With over 25,000 games released on Steam in 2025, the issue isn’t quality, it’s visibility. That figure is expected to rise this year, and the core problem for indie devs is being seen. The best game in the world fails if no one knows it exists. Stardock CEO Brad Wardell framed it as follows: “Think of some of the breakout hits of ten years ago. What would have happened if they were released today? They’d get lost in the daily release noise.”

Stardock is offering indie developers a way to step above the noise of 25,000 games. They’re looking for developers of strategy, sim, or RPG games to join a limited program. Only three titles each year will be chosen, to ensure each title gets the attention and resources it deserves. Stardock isn’t trying to build a catalogue of random indie games; it’s a studio with 30 years’ experience offering to do what most indie devs cannot do alone. You can find out more by contacting [email protected].

Let’s be clear: this doesn’t mean that the problems we outlined last month have gone away because one game performed well during one Steam fest. The issues facing the real-time strategy genre have not disappeared. The Nextfest result for Ashes 2 is worth paying attention to. The demand for awesome RTS games is still there. The audience, grumpy, aging, and cantankerous as it is, is still there. We have not abandoned RTS games. The RTS genre has lacked the execution and infrastructure to connect new games with the players who would love them. Maybe Stardock can be the answer to that problem, starting with Ashes of the Singularity II.

It is starting to look like a problem that can be solved, which is a very different conversation to the one we had last month.