Sins of a Solar Empire dev says RTS is “a dying market”
By Alice Lynton on February 2, 2013 at 11:54 am
There’s no room for new real-time strategy games, Ironclad Games studio director Blair Fraser told Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently.
“RTSes, to my mind, are very niche now. And that’s unfortunate, because that’s what I love, and that’s what I grew up playing, and that’s what I make. Or made, anyway,” he said. “It’s a dying market.”
Fraser explained that the “demographics have changed” and most RTS games simply won’t attract enough players to be profitable Inseatd, a handful of big names – StarCraft and Company of Heroes – will survive, will others die off. The developer said Age of Empires Online calling a halt to development demonstrates that it’s hard to balance what players will pay with what it costs to create new, balanced RTS elements.
Ironclad’s Sins of a Solar Empire, Fraser noted, is doing okay because it “diverged from classic RTS, so it still has a place” with a particular community – as do the Total War games, he added.
Ironclad’s next game is Sins of a Dark Age, announced as an RTS MOBA hybrid but now re-jigged as a pure MOBA aimed at players who aren’t interested in the high-level, very technical play of League of Legends and DOTA 2.
Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Sins of a Dark Age aims to mix some RPG into your MOBA
That's too many acronyms for one morning.
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I wonder if they will blame the market as well when Sins of a Dark Age fails.
There’s plenty of room for RTS on the market, you just need to make a GOOD one. To be fair, that’s almost impossible… but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable that there have only been 2 good ones in 15 years.
edit: I should clarify, when I say “good” I’m referring to multiplayer replayability, there have been countless good single player experiences but the multiplayer is what really counts.
“high-level, very technical play of League of Legends”
What the fuck….
I think he’s referring to the learning/failure curve, neither game is particularly noob friendly.
Sounds like “SC2 is slaughtering us”…….whether you like it or not its a big player in the RTS market.
I think the issue might just be in that it seems to be a lot of “same old” every time an RTS comes out.. unless they shake it up then of course it’s going to get stale.
When he cites Age Online as an example you know he has no real evidence to back up his claims.
Overall sounds more like a case (at best) that RTS’s are like old point and click Adventure games, the market hasn’t shrunk, it’s just not grown ridiculously like shooters. RTS ain’t dead nor are they dieing, just don’t expect to sell 1 trillion units like CoD because unlike CoD, RTS’s require the players to think, and think really hard.
I’m not good at them but I love RTS’s.
He also seems to have a really strict definition of RTS. Anything that isn’t like Starcraft or CnC with base building etc isn’t RTS which is just stupid. He also doesn’t understand the MOBA market from the sounds of things. He speaks of generations without realizing there will never be a LoL2, HoN2 and Dota3 because they’re not designed to have sequels, they’re designed to continually have content added and essentially exist forever.
JESUS FUCK, I HATE CORPORATE GAMING COMPANIES SPEWING THEIR “IDEAS”.
These guys made an RTS that’s single threaded, needed patching still a year after launch to fix basic bugs, and they are wondering why we aren’t all sitting there all day playing THEIR game.
Take a look at RTS, they are constantly dumbing it down.
Even games like Total Annihilation got dumbed down from having nuclear subs and planes that could be set to attack ground and/or air (all these things got ripped out from previous games) depending on your playstyle. And they still couldn’t get a decent warcraft 3 (2002 Release) style matchmaking in 2010!!!
They forget a lot of gamers are getting older, while they consistently dumb things down thinking they are selling toys instead of entertainment.
Why do we constantly have one game having a randomly generated map, and another game has a decent multiplayer matchmaking setup, yet another game has great and indepth gameplay but no matchmaking or replayability.
Then some dick who thinks he’s a fucking expert because he MADE one of these games pipes up and says “Oh RTS is dying out, cause noone is playing my game” ?!?!?!!?!??
Go play Sins with like 15 carriers and throw all the fighters into a system at the same time and watch how slow it runs on the ONE core it uses – if they hadn’t been a bunch of misers and had re-written the engine before they released and had a decent instant matchmaking system and gameplay, replayability it might not be so.
Don’t get me wrong, the game is cool, but once the AI’s are at a point where you have destroyed them, they just sit there and it takes you 3 hours to take all their planets before you can turn your attention to the next AI – it’s atrociously long and boring for a lot of the time.
I cannot believe of all the people to say this it was the Sins guy.
ARRRRRRGHHHHHHH.
Just reading Tim’s Sim City review he says it right there in spades – “I do. That’s the problem. I do imagine the possibilities, and they sound great. Why can’t I do any of them? “
Buy the rights to the Homeworld series then make No.3 without messing with the fun gameplay that made Homeworld popular!
After that, sell the game, without overcharging us Auzzies and make some money!
lordporksword,
Yeah I was kind of surprised how the homeworld IP was picked up so much later than much of the other stuff – it has huge potential.
I enjoy sins and still enjoy it.
If 15 carriers and their fighter compliment slowing you down then you’ve got PC issues. The biggest issue they had was ram reaching a 2gig limit which has now been resolved.
Matchmaking works well generally when the player base is high and Sins has never had that high a player base.
Yeah Ironclad fixed their issues ages ago.
I also dont beleive RTS is a dead market just because it isnt raking in as much money as the throw away COD games (and COD clones) does not mean its dead or dying. There have been some great RTS games in the last decade but I doubt any future titles will match the amount of time I spent playing C&C Zero Hour.
No genre is dead, it’s a stupid concept and even dumber to announce it.
Games fail, not genres. And this is because of the game, not of the genre.
Some genres are more popular, for sure. This is easily one of the key factors in the bringing of hybrid games we’ve seen .. and I have to say, they are the new and interesting place to watch. Well, that and “purists” who are focused on bringing *their* game to life.
This isn’t the early 90s, where anyone with half a good idea could bring something to market and make some form of success. Now, it’s hard. More competition, more diversity, and more options away from your game.
No offence but that’s rubbish. Rebellion still runs like crap even on an i7 3930K at 4.6Ghz. It’s been mentioned why too. It is only dual threaded (one for simulation and one for sounds). The is also a massive issue with jump calculations which still hasn’t been fixed as it is the primary cause of lag in MP and large AI games. This brings the game down to a sim speed equivalent to -10 in Total Annihilation (or Supreme Commander if you prefer!) resulting in a lag fest which is just tedious.
The comment about destroying AI is also true. Once you destroy their primary force you then have a 3-4hr slog to kill their remaining planets as each will have a fairly good defence, but due to unit limitations you can’t expand your force enough to wipe them out fast. Again a limited design flaw.
Basically a Sins dev hasn’t got the weight in the genre to go throwing around statements like he made Starcraft. If Chris Taylor (TA/SupCom) said the same thing (which I believe he did at some point) people would react the same way, SupCom was terrible, which got fixed by Forged Alliance too late. SupCom 2 was damaged goods before release due to consolitis and lack of modding potential to fix the obvious screw ups made during the dev process. TBH it’s why John Mavor and Planetary Annihilation succeeded so well and why GPG are having trouble with their Wildman kickstarter.
SupCom was on xbox 360 too.
More like starcraftitis as SupCom didn’t do as well as hoped and they figured they’d follow the leader, except people play starcraft 2 for the micro and the fact it’s one of the easiest RTS to get into.
The AI in SupCom 2 was the guy who made Sorian’s AI for supcom and it was very good (who’s now gone on to do planetary annihilation so I have high hopes for the AI there at least).
Planetary Annihilation also has no weight behind the devs, they claim all these different things they’ve worked on yet have no mention of what the gameplay will be (we don’t know whether it’ll be one planet or more, how resources will work, anything; if anything PA looks like supcom 2 with hopefully cross-planet gameplay akin to Sins cross solar system gameplay), whereas Chris Taylor actually DELIVERED total annihilation and supcom.
Exactly – (I have 6 cores and 16g, my computer is great) I am still waiting for the RTS Genre to evolve again personally. Companies rely too much on copying each other rather than being progressive – this is why genre’s fall by the wayside – people get bored.
What’s so very different between sup com 2 and warcraft 3 made 8 years ealier ? Not a lot – in fact warcraft 3 had better and easier matchmaking and still does.
These guys need to start working on more levels of complexity that aren’t necessarily compulsory for the player to mess with.
Take AI as an example. We sit some units in the corner, and if the enemy gets too close – they attack. Unless we set them on hold ground. We don’t tell them individually to attack, they just do it.
Why not have this level of complexity to be able to suggest which type of unit all your spearmen go for first, which units your planes should attack, or which units are more important for your bombers to hit ? It’s not necessary, but a player who has taken a little time to set this stuff up might find himself at an advantage against someone who hasn’t.
Turning the RTS Genre from a thinking game into some korean click-fest is completely not what people sitting at home in front of their computers are really after in this particular world.
Someone above suggested that the RTS genre was a thinking game, so instead of progressing graphics or units, why not progress the thing people buy RTS’s for – the thinking!
Being able to out-strategize someone should be more important than clicks per minute. This is where it’s falling down.
Frankly – fuck starcraft ;)
Sounds like a bunch of sour grapes-style whining to me. I think Relic, Blizzard and quite a few other developers would be having a quiet chuckle to themselves at such claims of a “dying market”.
RSOblivion,
Hnng I hate the AI bugs in Supcom that cause the game to slow down completely. Got the Sorian and Duncane AI’s recently to try and help with that though haven’t tried them in a massive 4v4 AI match yet. I’m really desperately hoping that Planetary Annihilation doesn’t have these dumb problems.
But the difference is it was a port released a year later unlike Supcom2 which was made to work on consoles from the start and was released at the same time.
Maybe make an RTS that is less impersonal and more fun and you’ll do better.
I love Homeworld 1/2/C and I dearly wanted to love Sins of a Solar Empire but I found it tedious and difficult to engage with.