You’re not confused. You hit the nail directly on the head. People here think that because their own personal tastes have dissuaded them from playing RTSs, despite it remaining an incredibly diverse, successful, and healthy genre, they need to justify to others why they’re a dying breed in order to strengthen an entirely flawed premise.
Ok, I did. I responded “No, I don’t think an RTS will ever do numbers like that, but that prediction is hopelessly, utterly irrelevant to the thread”.
RTSs have never been a mainstream genre. Why are you suddenly calling the genre dead or dying when it still isn’t today, despite remaining successful?
I’m just upset that there are very few games where I can chop down trees, and then have those trees made into houses. Chopping trees and clearing land is satisfying.
But I think minor updates are the best seller because the existing crowd is bound to be interested. When you make big updates, say Kohan to Kohan II, you can lose your audience and fail to attract a new one.
Heh, all these countries from World War II to choose from, so they add a second German faction. Genius.
Because that’s the most profitable way to invest money in media products:
Take Sins of a Solar Empire like I mentioned earlier. The game’s budget was around $1 million, yet last I heard (and this was quite some time ago) it sold upwards of 800,000 copies.
That’s because they happened upon a publisher (Stardock) who had just about that much money, and a fancy to publish games. If Stardock had much more money they’d only finance blockbusters like everyone else. And if Stardock wasn’t a private company run by Brad Wardell they wouldn’t bother financing games at all.
that is an incredible profit margin simply because the budget was also nowhere near MW2
That doesn’t necessarily follow. I don’t have the specifics on these two games, but on average blockbusters have a higher returns on investment. Which is why anyone who has the money to fund games like MW2 does just that.
The movie industry does not expect every single movie to be a blockbuster success.
Any film studio that can afford the expenses tries to get as many blockbusters as possible because those are the most profitable investments. The rest is just filler.
The RTS genre can be alive and well, even if it’s not shipping 8 million units per title.
No it can’t, not for long. That’s exactly what they said about wargames and flight sims, and look what happened. Anything that’s not at the top inevitably shrinks until it becomes a mini-budget niche market. The medium budget section is unprofitable and unstable in the long run. Those games are too expensive for self-financing and not profitable enough for external investment, hence the spiral of doom.
I’m not going to argue about this, by the way. Just read the article.
edit: Okay, one point where games differ from other media – you have different platforms, and each platform sets its own expectations that may allow for relatively lower budgets. Also, an exclusive platform owner may finance less profitable games simply to offer a broader selection to buyers. Migrating to cheaper platforms (portables, downloadables) has recently been a popular way to counter exploding budgets. But that only works until the budgets on those platforms explode, too…
You’re right. RTS is still a dominant genre on PCs. They have historically been a dominant genre on PCs.
Doesn’t at all mean they were ever “mainstream” in remotely the same sense that GTA 4 or Call of Duty is, so the comparison is still completely, utterly irrelevant to whether the genre today is “dead” or “dying”.
Why do the circumstances matter? Once again, more special cases and special circumstances and redefinitions.
800,000 copies sold is nothing to balk at, and it’s hilariously revealing just how desperate people are getting in this thread to continue to support an entirely false premise.
And…how is this different than it has ever been for the last decade or more? If your predictions were even close to accurate or relevant, the RTS genre would have legitimately died off years ago. Instead, 2009 was one of the strongest years in history for RTSs, and it didn’t even need Starcraft II to reach that status.
Who is “they?” When does this magical period of time begin? Who ever said anything like this about flight sims?
Why are people even talking about flight sims? Flight sims inherently require significant more investment than a $40-50 game because of the custom hardware and build-in requirement of absolute, genuine, pure, hardcore interest in simulations.
Is it really that difficult to understand how drastically different flight sims are from your regular RTSs? The investments required for each genre are in no way comparable at all.
Which is exactly why Sins of a Solar Empire and Stardock’s other published games are so god damned fucking successful, and why their future games will doubtlessly be as well. Yet at the same time, it’s sure not stopping games like Dawn of War II and Empire: Total War from releasing.
For those curious, here are the games I counted for that year:
Colony Wars 2492
Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal
Gene Wars
War Diary
Blood & Magic
Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat
War Wind
Victory
Z
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations
Really, is anyone missing the mediocre C&C clones of the late 90s and early00s? Does the world need another KKND? Quality over quantity: with Relic (CoH, DoW), Gas Powered Games (Demigod, Supreme Commander), EA (BfME, C&C), and of course Blizzard still in the game, I don’t think we’ve been hurting for quality RTS titles in recent years. Yes, we’ve lost some stalwarts, like Ensemble (Age of Empires) and Big Huge Games (Rise of Nations), and they will be missed; but overall I’d say the good outweighs the bad.
Has 122 results, with some cross platform wonkiness, as its counting the same game released on the same platform as being a different game, but even dividing that by 3 still results in more than 10 games. (and some of those games weren’t released on multiple platforms–but some may be erroneously listed…so its a wash)
My numbers are of course far from scientific, they’re taken from a personal game-list of mine that’s mainly derived from a local game magazine I buy regularly and mobygames.
I do, however, believe it should cover a majority of titles and while the numbers aren’t 100% correct, the trends should be.
Oh, and no console games are counted, PC only.
The 2009 games are:
BattleForge
Codename: Panzers - Cold War
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 - Uprising
Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor
Demigod
Galactic Dream: Rages of War
League of Legends
Stalin vs. Martians
Stormrise
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II
World in Conflict: Soviet Assault
… hmm, one is missing. Gotta re-check the base list, but anyway.
Edit: The missing game was Order of War.
That Metacritic link is a joke. It lists game like a Wii game called Offshore Tycoon, the King’s Bounty expansion (how’s that a RTS?) and Gratuitous Space Battles.
If it did need $40 million, it was a massive, company-killing failure. I can’t imagine anyone at THQ—or any publisher—greenlighting a PC-only non-MMO with that kind of budget.
I’d guess it had a budget in the $10-$15 million range, and a million of that is probably for CG. There are fewer assets, less video, less VO, less animation,a lower level of level design complexity… in general, it takes way fewer people to make an RTS than a modern “cinematic” 3D shooter. Or at least it should.
I think starcraft 2 is easily pushing that much by now.
StarCraft II is the exception. The way, way, not-even-close-to-anyone-else’s-reality exception. It’s probably a $100 million game, mostly because they know it’ll make that back (and more) in one day in Korea.
RUSE (Not yet released, afaik)
Swords and Soldiers (Not on PC, afaik)
Sins of a Solar Empire (-> Space 4x genre)
Men of War (-> I put the entire series in “Squal level strategy”, though I gotta admit the latest installation could definately count as RTS)
Empire Total War (-> Multi-genre strategy, turn-based map / real-time combat)
Yes, you could count some or even all of these games as RTS, but I tried to use consistent criteria over the years, so for example Pax Imperia is also a Space 4x game, not a RTS.
But when you consider its development length—I assume what we’re seeing now is like rev 3 or 4, over a 6-10 year period, done by lord knows how many different teams of varying quantities—the number of people at Blizzard, the amount of CG work they do, the “let’s split it into three games” quantity of content, what I would assume is fairly generous pay at Blizzard… it adds up pretty quickly.
And Starcraft 2 is really going to be three games, right? Yeah, they can spend $100M and make a nice profit.
Seriously, if you’re guaranteed something like 5 million sales right off the bat—in one region alone!—you probably don’t need to worry all that much about development costs.
Blizzard operates in a different world than the rest of the game industry.
Is it verified they are spending that much? For 100 million dollars i’d expect a revolution in rts, not a game that mostly looks the same, with a few new features/units.
Like I said, I have no idea. I’m just guessing that a company of Blizzard’s size can’t really make inexpensive games, and that StarCraft II has been through multiple revisions with large teams.
I does add up pretty quickly. For example, if there were 100 people (artists, programmers, designers, managers, etc) earning an average of $100,000 a year for 10 years, that’s $100 million already. At the beginning of a project, a core team would probably be less than 100 people, at the end of a project, it would probably be a lot more than 100 people, and since they’re out near San Francisco, I’m betting the $100,000 a year average might actually be low-balling it for Blizzard employees, I don’t know. But once you start talking about any project going on for 6-10 years, the numbers really start adding up to a lot.
